Though the extension of glaciers is nowadays more firmly believed than ever, and their presence traced in many parts of the world where they were unsuspected before, still it is very generally admitted by the younger school that their erosive power was overstated by the geologists of thirty years ago, and that the origin of lake-basins is a problem which cannot be solved by the application of any single formula. And a more detailed research into the structure of mountains shows that the simple denudation of a chalk hill is not a sufficient analogy for their very complex phenomena. Mr. Ruskin pointed out the importance of metamorphism in the elevation and curvature of these cretaceous strata, anticipating recent studies (on which see further in our eighth chapter); and he suggested that this action was continuous, — certainly not catastrophic, as another art writer turned geologist, the great Viollet le Duc, twelve years later implied in the opening words of his work on Mont Blanc.1

As examples of Savoy mountains this lecture described in detail the Salève, on which Mr. Ruskin had been living for two winters, and the Brezon, the top of which he had tried to buy from the commune of Bonneville - one of his many plans for settling among the Alps. The commune thought he had found a gold-mine up there, and

1 "La croûte terrestre, refroidie au moment du plissement qui a formé le massif du Mont Blanc, n'avait pas encore atteint le degré de dureté qu'elle a acquis depuis."

Other attempts

raised the price out of all reason. to make a home in the châteaux or chalets of Savoy were foiled, or abandoned, like his earlier idea to live in Venice. But his scrambles on the Salève led him to hesitate in accepting the explanation given by Alphonse Favre of the curious northwest face of steeply inclined vertical slabs, which he suspected to be created by cleavage, on the analogy of other Jurassic precipices. The Brezon - brisant, breaking-wave - he took as a type of the billowy form of limestone Alps in general, and his analysis of it was serviceable and substantially correct.

This lecture was followed in 1864 by desultory correspondence with Mr. Jukes and others in the "Reader," in which he merely restated his conclusions, too slightly to convince. Had he devoted himself to a thorough examination of the subject but this is in the region of what might have been. He was more seriously engaged in other pursuits, of more immediate importance. Three days after his lecture he was being examined before the Royal Academy commission, and after a short summer visit to various friends in the north of England, he set out again for the Alps, partly to study the geology of Chamouni and North Switzerland, partly to continue his drawings of Swiss towns at Baden and Lauffenburg, with his pupil John Bunney. But even there the bur den of his real mission could not be shaken off, and though again seeking health and a quiet

mind, he could not quite keep silence, but wrote letters to English newspapers on the depreciation of gold (repeating his theory of currency), and on the wrongs of Poland and Italy; and he put together more papers, never published, in continuation of his " Munera Pulveris."

But this desultory habit, by which Mr. Ruskin's strength was broken up into many channels, while it prevented his doing any one great work with convincing thoroughness in his later period, -was not by any means an unbalanced misfortune. It is quite impossible for a man who has no feeling for art and no interest in science to regard life as a whole, especially modern life: and this Mr. Ruskin was better fitted than any of his contemporaries to do.

In the last century, Samuel Johnson, great thinker as he was, found his influence decisively limited by his ignorance of the arts, and his consequent inability to take into his purview a whole range of emotions, activities, and influences which are really important in the sphere of ethics, as motives of action and indices of character. So in this century, Johnson's spiritual successor, Carlyle, from a similar lack of sympathy with art and an indolence in acquiring even the rudiments of physical science, - from a strange want of ear for poetry and eye for nature, was left short-handed, short-sighted, in many an enterprise. In framing an ideal of life he is narrow, ascetic, rude, as compared with the wider and more refined culture of a Ruskin.