ge, making them unavailable for the
architecture of more elaborate edifices. One very great advantage is
thus secured for the scenery they compose, namely, that it is rarely
broken by quarries. A single quarry will often spoil a whole Alpine
landscape; the effect of the lovely bay of the Lago Maggiore, for
instance, in which lie the Borromean Islands, is, in great part,
destroyed by the scar caused by a quarry of pink granite on its western
shore; and the valley of Chamouni itself has lost some of its loveliest
rock scenery in consequence of the unfortunate discovery that the
boulders which had fallen from its higher pinnacles, and were lying in
massy heaps among its pines, were available for stone lintels and
door-posts in the building of its new inns. But the slaty crystallines,
though sometimes containing valuable mines, are hardly ever quarried for
stone; and the scenes they compose retain, in general, little disturbed
by man, their aspect of melancholy power, or simple and noble peace. The
color of their own mass, when freshly broken, is nearly the same as that
of the compact crystallines; but it is far more varied by veins and
zones of included minerals, and contains usually more iron, which gives
a rich brown or golden color to their exposed sides, so that the
coloring of these rocks is the most glowing to be found in the mountain
world. They form also soil for vegetation more quickly, and of a more
fruitful kind than the granites, and appear, on the whole, intended to
unite every character of grandeur and of beauty, and to constitute the
loveliest as well as the noblest scenes which the earth ever unfolds to
the eyes of men.

FOOTNOTES

[45] See again Appendix 2. Slaty Cleavage.

[46] This is a piece of the gneiss of the Montanvert, near the
Chalets of Blaitiere dessous.

[47] "Some idea may be formed of the nature of these incurvations by
supposing the gneiss beds to have been in a plastic state, either
from the action of heat or of some other unknown cause, and, while
in this state, to have been subjected to pressure at the two
extremities, or in some other parts, according to the nature of the
curvatures. But even this hypothesis (though the best that has been
thought of) will scarcely enable us to explain all the contortions
which not merely the beds of gneiss, but likewise of mica slate and
clay slate, and even greywacke slate, exhibit. There is a bed of