ere.

Sec. 15. It is rare, however, that such a cliff as that represented in Fig.
12 can maintain itself long in such a contour. Usually it moulders
gradually away into a steep mound or bank; and the larger number of bold
cliffs are composed of far more solid rock, which in its general make is
quite unshattered and flawless; apparently unaffected, as far as its
coherence is concerned, by any shock it may have suffered in being
raised to its position, or hewn into its form. Beds occur in the Alps
composed of solid coherent limestone (such as that familiar to the
English traveller in the cliffs of Matlock and Bristol), 3000 or 4000
feet thick, and broken short off throughout a great part of this
thickness, forming nearly[50] sheer precipices not less than 1500 or
2000 feet in height, after all deduction has been made for slopes of
debris at the bottom, and for rounded diminution at the top.

Sec. 16. The geologist plunges into vague suppositions and fantastic
theories in order to account for these cliffs; but, after all that can
be dreamed or discovered, they remain in great part inexplicable. If
they were interiorly shattered, it would be easy to understand that, in
their hardened condition, they had been broken violently asunder; but it
is not easy to conceive a firm cliff of limestone broken through a
thickness of 2000 feet without showing a crack in any other part of it.
If they were divided in a soft state, like that of paste, it is still
less easy to understand how any such soft material could maintain
itself, till it dried, in the form of a cliff so enormous and so
ponderous: it must have flowed down from the top, or squeezed itself out
in bulging protuberance at the base. But it has done neither; and we are
left to choose between the suppositions that the mountain was created in
a form approximating to that which it now wears, or that the shock which
produced it was so violent and irresistible, as to do its work neatly
in an instant, and cause no flaws to the rock except in the actual line
of fracture. The force must have been analogous either to the light and
sharp blow of the hammer with which one breaks a stone into two pieces
as it lies in the hand, or the parting caused by settlement under great
weight, like the cracks through the brickwork of a modern ill-built
house. And yet the very beds which seem at the time they were broken to
have possessed this firmness of consistency, are also bent throughout
their