things; and it happens necessarily from the deepening of the soil. Let
us then examine this operation.

When no more soil is left upon the stony bottom than is sufficient for
the covering of the ground, and rooting of plants which are also fixed
in the solid ground or bottom of the soil, the water is not able to
carry away the plants; and these plants protect the surface of loose
soil. When again there is a depth of soil accumulated upon the haugh,
the surface only is protected by the vegetable covering. But what avails
it to the soil to be protected from above, when undermined by the enemy!
The vegetable roots now no longer reaching to the bottom where solidity
is found, the tender soil below is easily washed away by the continued
efforts of the stream; and the unsupported meadow, with the impregnable
texture of its leaves, its roots, and its fibres, falls ruinously into
the river, and is born away in triumph by the flood. The water thus
reclaims its long deserted bed,--only in order to pass from it again,
and circulate or meander from hill to hill in varying perpetually its
course.

Now this progress of the river, or this changing of its bed, is
determined by the strong resistance of the new made haugh, humbly
standing firm in the protection of its vegetation, while the elevated
surface of the older haugh, deserted by the inferior soil which it had
ceased to protect, falls a victim to its exalted state, and passes away
to aggrandize another. This is the fate of haughs or plains erected by
the operations of a river, and again destroyed in the natural course of
things, or in the very continuation of that active cause by which they
had been formed.

The water is constantly carrying the moveable soil from the higher to
the lower place; vegetation often disputes the possession of these
spoils of ruined mountains for a while; but, in the end, this vegetable
protector, not only delivers up to the destroying cause the mineral soil
which it had preserved, but, by its buoyancy in water, it facilitates
the transportation of the stony parts to which this fibrous body is
attached. Over and over a thousand times may be repeated this alternate
possession of the transferable soil, by moving water on the one part and
by fixed vegetation on the other, but at last all must land upon the
shore, whether the river tends. Thus the mountain and the plain, the
vegetable earth and the plants produced in that soil, must all return
into the s