ment
succeeding fragment, keeping the line of the original crystal, while the
quartz fills up the intervening spaces. Now tourmaline has a trick of
doing this, more than any other mineral I know: here is another bit
which I picked up on the glacier of Macugnaga; it is broken, like a
pillar built of very flat broad stones, into about thirty joints, and
all these are heaved and warped away from each other sideways, almost
into a line of steps; and then all is filled up with quartz paste. And
here, lastly, is a green Indian piece, in which the pillar is first
disjointed, and then wrung round into the shape of an S.

MARY. How _can_ this have been done?

L. There are a thousand ways in which it may have been done; the
difficulty is not to account for the doing of it; but for the showing of
it in some crystals, and not in others. You never by any chance get a
quartz crystal broken or twisted in this way. If it break or twist at
all, which it does sometimes, like the spire of Dijon, it is by its own
will or fault; it never seems to have been passively crushed. But, for
the forces which cause this passive ruin of the tourmaline,--here is a
stone which will show you multitudes of them in operation at once. It is
known as 'brecciated agate,' beautiful, as you see; and highly valued as
a pebble: yet, so far as I can read or hear, no one has ever looked at
it with the least attention. At the first glance, you see it is made of
very fine red striped agates, which have been broken into small pieces,
and fastened together again by paste, also of agate. There would be
nothing wonderful in this, if this were all. It is well known that by
the movements of strata, portions of rock are often shattered to
pieces:--well known also that agate is a deposit of flint by water under
certain conditions of heat and pressure: there is, therefore, nothing
wonderful in an agate's being broken; and nothing wonderful in its
being mended with the solution out of which it was itself originally
congealed. And with this explanation, most people, looking at a
brecciated agate, or brecciated anything, seem to be satisfied. I was so
myself, for twenty years; but, lately happening to stay for some time at
the Swiss Baden, where the beach of the Limmat is almost wholly composed
of brecciated limestones, I began to examine them thoughtfully; and
perceived, in the end, that they were, one and all, knots of as rich
mystery as any poor little human brain was ever