terrific and less secure, takes place exactly
in proportion to the increasing presence of such conditions in the
locality as shall render it on other grounds unlikely to be inhabited,
or incapable of being so. Where the soil is rich and the climate soft,
the hills are low and safe;[52] as the ground becomes poorer and the air
keener, they rise into forms of more peril and pride; and their utmost
terror is shown only where their fragments fall on trackless ice, and
the thunder of their ruin can be heard but by the ibex and the eagle.

Sec. 4. The safety of the lower mountains depends, as has just been
observed, on their tendency to divide themselves into beds. But it will
easily be understood that, together with security, such a structure
involves some monotony of aspect; and that the possibility of a rent
like that indicated in the last figure, extending itself without a
check, so as to detach some vast portion of the mountain at once, would
be a means of obtaining accidental forms of far greater awfulness. We
find, accordingly, that the bedded structure is departed from in the
central peaks; that they are in reality gifted with this power, or, if
we choose so to regard it, affected with this weakness, of rending
downwards throughout into vertical sheets; and that to this end they are
usually composed of that structureless and massive rock which we have
characterized by the term "compact crystalline."

Sec. 5. This, indeed, is not universal. It happens sometimes that toward
the centre of great hill ranges ordinary stratified rocks of the
coherent groups are hardened into more compact strength than is usual
with them; and out of the hardened mass a peak, or range of peaks, is
cut as if out of a single block. Thus the well known Dent du Midi of
Bex, a mountain of peculiar interest to the English travellers who crowd
the various inns and pensions which now glitter along the shores of the
Lake of Geneva at Vevay, Clarens, and Montreux, is cut out of horizontal
beds of rock which are traceable in the evening light by their dark and
light lines along its sides, like courses of masonry; the real form of
the mountain being that of the ridge of a steep house-roof, jagged and
broken at the top, so that, seen from near St. Maurice, the extremity of
the ridge appears a sharp pyramid. The Dent de Morcles, opposite the
Dent du Midi, has been already noticed, and is figured in Plate 29, Fig.
4. In like manner, the Matterhorn is cut o