bid. From this quart of water I
obtained twenty-four grains of sand and sediment more or less fine. I
cannot estimate the quantity of water in the stream; but the runlet of
it at which I filled the flask was giving about two hundred bottles a
minute, or rather more, carrying down, therefore, about three quarters
of a pound of powdered granite every minute. This would be forty-five
pounds an hour; but allowing for the inferior power of the stream in
the cooler periods of the day, and taking into consideration, on the
other side, its increased power in rain, we may, I think, estimate its
average hour's work at twenty-eight or thirty pounds, or a
hundredweight every four hours. By this insignificant runlet,
therefore, rather more than two tons of the substance of the Mont
Blanc are displaced and carried down a certain distance every week;
and as it is only for three or four months that the flow of the stream
is checked by frost, we may certainly allow eighty tons for the mass
which it annually moves. It is not worth while to enter into any
calculation of the relation borne by this runlet to the great torrents
which descend from the chain of Mont Blanc into the valley of
Chamouni.[20] I but take this quantity, eighty tons, as the result of
the labour of a scarcely noticeable runlet at the side of one of them,
utterly irrespective of all sudden falls of stones and of masses of
mountain (a single thunderbolt will sometimes leave a scar on the
flank of a soft rock looking like a trench for a railroad), and we
shall then begin to apprehend something of the operation of the great
laws of change which are the conditions of all material existence,
however apparently enduring. The hills, which, as compared with living
beings, seem "everlasting," are in truth as perishing as they; its
veins of flowing fountain weary the mountain heart, as the crimson
pulse does ours; the natural force of the iron crag is abated in its
appointed time, like the strength of the sinews in a human old age;
and it is but the lapse of the longer years of decay which, in the
sight of its Creator, distinguishes the mountain range from the moth
and the worm.

[20] I have slightly modified and abridged what follows, being impatient
of its prolixity, as well as ashamed of what is truly called the
ludicrous under-estimate of the mass of the larger streams.

31. Few people, comparatively, have ever seen the effect on the sea of
a powerful gale continued witho