, just as if we had the actual rocks before us;
for this indicates not that one truth is given, nor another, not that a
pretty or interesting morsel has been selected here and there, but that
the whole truth has been given, with all the relations of its parts; so
that we can pick and choose our points of pleasure or of thought for
ourselves, and reason upon the whole with the same certainty which we
should after having climbed and hammered over the rocks bit by bit. With
this drawing before him, a geologist could give a lecture upon the whole
system of aqueous erosion, and speculate as safely upon the past and
future states of this very spot, as if he were standing and getting wet
with the spray. He would tell you, at once, that the waterfall was in a
state of rapid recession; that it had once formed a wide cataract just
at the spot where the figure is sitting on the heap of debris; and that
when it was there, part of it came down by the channel on the left, its
bed being still marked by the delicately chiselled lines of fissure. He
would tell you that the foreground had also once been the top of the
fall, and that the vertical fissures on the right of it were evidently
then the channel of a side stream. He would tell you that the fall was
then much lower than it is now, and that being lower, it had less force,
and cut itself a narrower bed; and that the spot where it reached the
higher precipice is marked by the expansion of the wide basin which its
increased violence has excavated, and by the gradually increasing
concavity of the rocks below, which we see have been hollowed into a
complete vault by the elastic bound of the water. But neither he nor I
could tell you with what exquisite and finished marking of every
fragment and particle of soil or rock, both in its own structure and the
evidence it bears of these great influences, the whole of this is
confirmed and carried out.

Sec. 25. Beautiful instance of an exception to general rules in the
Llanthony.

With this inimitable drawing we may compare the rocks in the foreground
of the Llanthony. These latter are not divided by joints, but into thin
horizontal and united beds, which the torrent in its times of flood has
chiselled away, leaving one exposed under another, with the sweeping
marks of its eddies upon their edges. And here we have an instance of an
exception to a general rule, occasioned by particular and local action.
We have seen that the action