pressed in Poland and in Italy: and he had been. silenced. What could he do but, as he said in the letters to Mr. Norton, "lay his head to the very ground," and try to forget it all among the stones and the snows?

He wandered about, geologizing, and spent a while at Talloires on the Lake of Annecy, where the old abbey had been turned into an inn, and one slept in a monk's cell and meditated in the cloister of the monastery, St. Bernard of Menthon's memory haunting the place, and St. Germain's cave close by in the rocks above. About the end of May Mr. Ruskin came back to England, and was invited to lecture again at the Royal Institution. The subject he chose was "The Stratified Alps of Savoy."

At that time many distinguished foreign geologists were working at the Alps; but little of conclusive importance had been published, except in papers imbedded in Transactions of various societies. Professor Alphonse Favre's great work did not appear until 1867, and the "Mechanismus der Gebirgsbildung" of Professor Heim not till 1878; so that for an English public the subject was a fresh one. To Mr. Ruskin it was familiar: he had been elected a Fellow of the Geological Society in 1840, at the age of twenty-one; he had worked through Savoy with his Saussure in hand nearly thirty years before, and, many a time since that, had spent the intervals of literary business in rambling and climbing with the hammer

and notebook. Indeed, on all his travels, and even on his usual afternoon walks, he was accustomed to keep his eyes open for the geology of any neighborhood he was in; and his servant regularly carried a bag for specimens, which rarely came home empty. The notebooks of the "Modern Painters" period contain infinite memoranda and diagrammatic sketches, of which a very small fraction have been used. In the field he had compared Studer's meagre sections, and consulted the available authorities on physical geology, though he had never entered upon the more popular sister-science of palæontology. He left the determination of strata to specialists: his interest was fixed on the structure of mountains - the relation of geology to scenery; a question upon which he had some right to be heard, as knowing more about scenery than most geologists, and more about geology than most artists. His dissent from orthodox opinions was not the mere blunder of an ill-informed amateur; it was a protest against the adoption of certain views which had become fashionable chiefly owing to the popularity of the men who had propounded them. Parallel with the state religion in England there has been a state science; the prestige of the science bishops has been no doubt as wisely used as that of the church bishops: it has certainly prevailed with their own inferior clergy and laity in much the same way. Mr. Ruskin, who had been the admirer, and to some extent

the personal pupil, of several of the leading geologists of the last generation, questioned the infallibility of the more recent school. Science, of course, always welcomes investigation up to a certain point, and so, as the "Journal de Genève' reported, "la foule se pressait dans les salles de l'Institut royale de Londres, pour entendre la lecture des fragments d'un ouvrage scientifique, dont l'auteur compte parmi les écrivains les plus estimés de l'Angleterre. M. Ruskin s'est fait connaître depuis longtemps par des publications remarquables sur l'art en général et la peinture en particulier, mais il se présentait cette fois à son auditoire sous un nouveau jour. C'était le géologue que l'on venait entendre, et l'événement a prouvé qu'il n'était point inférieur au littérateur et au critique."

The main object of this lecture was to draw attention to a series of mountain and valley forms which he wished to contrast with those more familiar to English geologists, not only with regard to their aspect, but still more with regard to their origin. The great discovery of the extension of glaciers, the work of an ice-age and the phenomena of denudation, as opposed to the theories of half a century back, had taught that mountain forms were, roughly speaking, not repoussé work on the earth's surface, but chased and sculptured into it. Saussure and his generation had seemed to think that every hill or group of hills had been thrust up independently; and

that every valley or fissure had been burst open by a convulsion. A later school had taken the tiny valleys in our clay hills, and the chines in chalk downs, as their type, and referred the modeling of the whole earth's surface to the erosive action of water. In 1863 a third group of investigators was accustomed to explain everything by glacial action. They imagined our Lake district mountains, for example, to be carved by ice out of an enormous dome, two thousand feet higher than Sca-fell; and the Alps themselves to be the remnants of a similar Titanic mound, into which the glaciers had planed the valleys and gouged the lake-basins. A few voices were raised here and there against the theory; but as it was taught by the heads of the Geological Survey, men whose work in other respects was of the highest value and their attainments and characters unimpeachable, the glacial origin of "scenery" was accepted by the public with its usual docility.

In the Alps of Savoy, Mr. Ruskin wished to give an instance of a group of mountains whose forms, unlike those of Britain, could be shown to depend far more upon internal structure and original elevation than upon unassisted erosion, though erosion played its own part. He showed how they could never have been a formless mound; but had been elevated in a consistent series of wave-like ridges; cut across and carved into by erosion, but separated also longitudinally by the

actual trenches between the waves.

So that the

old Saussurian theory, modified by Lyell's doctrine of denudation, might still form the basis of an explanation more true to facts than the glacial theory, which breaks down when it is applied to the combes and vallons, or longitudinal valleys.

He went on to give reasons for his belief that the erosive power of glaciers had been greatly overrated. In defending the "viscous theory" of Professor James Forbes (Principal Forbes), his old acquaintance, he held that a great mass of ice was not a rigid body which slid or was thrust violently over the rock surface, rasping it with imbedded stones, and digging into the valley bottoms to excavate basins. Judging from the curves it takes, as seen in sections, and it must be remembered that curvature had been his specialty, - he considered it as flowing, like a mass of thick honey; and therefore powerless for erosion, except on a slope, where its normal viscous flow was accelerated by gravitation, or became an actual sliding over rocks already inclined and comparatively smooth. These, and occasional upstanding knolls, it could more or less polish, he allowed ; but the universal presence of glacier-scoring and roches moutonnées he considered to be evidences of the very limited erosive power of ice, not proofs of its universal and overwhelming agency. The Savoy Alps, therefore, owe their form, first to upheaval, next to aqueous erosion, and last, in a very minor degree, to glacial action.