e may obtain almost
every color pleasant to human sight, not the less so for being generally
a little softened or saddened. Thus we have beautiful subdued reds,
reaching tones of deep purple, in the porphyries, and of pale rose
color, in the granites; every kind of silvery and leaden grey, passing
into purple, in the slates; deep green, and every hue of greenish grey,
in the volcanic rocks and serpentines; rich orange, and golden brown, in
the gneiss; black, in the lias limestones; and all these, together with
pure white, in the marbles. One color only we hardly ever get in an
exposed rock--that dull _brown_ which we noticed above, in speaking of
color generally, as the most repulsive of all hues; every approximation
to it is softened by nature, when exposed to the atmosphere, into a
purple grey. All this can hardly be otherwise interpreted, than as
prepared for the delight and recreation of man; and I trust that the
time may soon come when these beneficent and beautiful gifts of color
may be rightly felt and wisely employed, and when the variegated fronts
of our houses may render the term "stone-color" as little definite in
the mind of the architect as that of "flower-color" would be to the
horticulturist.

CHAPTER XII.

ON THE SCULPTURE OF MOUNTAINS:--FIRST, THE LATERAL RANGES.

Sec. 1. Close beside the path by which travellers ascend the Montanvert
from the valley of Chamouni, on the right hand, where it first begins to
rise among the pines, there descends a small stream from the foot of the
granite peak known to the guides as the Aiguille Charmoz. It is
concealed from the traveller by a thicket of alder, and its murmur is
hardly heard, for it is one of the weakest streams of the valley. But it
is a constant stream; fed by a permanent though small glacier, and
continuing to flow even to the close of the summer, when more copious
torrents, depending only on the melting of the lower snows, have left
their beds "stony channels in the sun."

I suppose that my readers must be generally aware that glaciers are
masses of ice in slow motion, at the rate of from ten to twenty inches a
day, and that the stones which are caught between them and the rocks
over which they pass, or which are embedded in the ice and dragged along
by it over those rocks, are of course subjected to a crushing and
grinding power altogether unparalleled by any other force in constant
action. The dust to which these stones are reduced by the