hill and plain. It is one of
our commonest American rocks.

Much of the loftiest and noblest scenery of the world is wrought in
granite. The Alps, the Andes, and the Himalayas, all of which are
world-celebrated for their lofty grandeur, are prevailingly granite.
They abound in towering peaks, bristling ridges, and terrifying
precipices. Their glacial cirques are girt with fantastically toothed
and pinnacled walls.

This is true of all granite ranges which are lofty enough to maintain
glaciers. These are, in fact, the very characteristics of Alpine,
Andean, Himalayan, Sierran, Alaskan, and Rocky Mountain summit
landscape. It is why granite mountains are the favorites of those daring
climbers whose ambition is to equal established records and make new
ones; and this in turn is why some mountain neighborhoods become so much
more celebrated than others which are quite as fine, or finer--because,
I mean, of the publicity given to this kind of mountain climbing, and of
the unwarranted assumption that the mountains associated with these
exploits necessarily excel others in sublimity. As a matter of fact, the
accident of fashion has even more to do with the fame of mountains than
of men.

But by no means all granite mountains are lofty. The White Mountains,
for example, which parallel our northeastern coast, and are far older
than the Rockies and the Sierra, are a low granite range, with few of
the characteristics of those mountains which lift their heads among the
perpetual snows. On the contrary, they tend to rounded forested summits
and knobby peaks. This results in part from a longer subjection of the
rock surface to the eroding influence of successive frosts and rains
than is the case with high ranges which are perpetually locked in frost.
Besides, the ice sheets which planed off the northern part of the United
States lopped away their highest parts.

There are also millions of square miles of eroded granite which are not
mountains at all. These tend to rolling surfaces.

The scenic forms assumed by granite will be better appreciated when one
understands how it enters landscape. The principal one of many igneous
rocks, it is liquefied under intense heat and afterward cooled under
pressure. Much of the earth's crust was once underlaid by granites in a
more or less fluid state. When terrific internal pressures caused the
earth's crust to fold and make mountains, this liquefied granite invaded
the folds and pushed close