work of water and ice is in mountain surgery like that of
lancet and sponge--one for incision, the other for ablution. No
excavation by ice was possible on a large scale, any more than by a
stream of honey; and its various actions, with their limitations, were
only to be understood by keeping always clearly in view the great law of
its motion as a viscous substance, determined by Professor James Forbes.

297. The existing forms of the Alps are, therefore, traceable chiefly to
denudation as they rose from the sea, followed by more or less violent
aqueous action, partly arrested during the glacial periods, while the
produced diluvium was carried away into the valley of the Rhine or into
the North Sea. One very important result of denudation had not yet been
sufficiently regarded; namely, that when portions of a thick bed (as the
Rudisten-kalk) had been entirely removed, the weight of the remaining
masses, pressing unequally on the inferior beds, would, when these were
soft (as the Neocomian marls), press them up into arched conditions,
like those of the floors of coal-mines in what the miners called
"creeps." Many anomalous positions of the beds of Spatangenkalk in the
district of the Lake of Annecy were in all probability owing to this
cause: they might be studied advantageously in the sloping base of the
great Rochers de Lanfon, which, disintegrating in curved, nearly
vertical flakes, each a thousand feet in height, were nevertheless a
mere outlying remnant of the great horizontal formation of the Parmelan,
and formed, like it, of very thin horizontal beds of Rudisten-kalk,
imposed on shaly masses of Neocomian, modified by their pressure. More
complex forms of harder rock were wrought by the streams and rains into
fantastic outlines; and the transverse gorges were cut deep where they
had been first traced by fault or distortion. The analysis of this
aqueous action would alone require a series of discourses; but the sum
of the facts was that the best and most interesting portions of the
mountains were just those which were finally left, the centers and
joints, as it were, of the Alpine anatomy. Immeasurable periods of time
would be required to wear these away; and to all appearances, during the
process of their destruction, others were rising to take their place,
and forms of perhaps far more nobly organized mountain would witness the
collateral progress of humanity.

J. R.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 35: Read by Mr.