important facts about the cliff.

[Illustration: 32. Aiguille Drawing.
1. Old Ideal. 2. Turnerian.]

Sec. 22. Recurring then to our "public opinion" of the Aiguille Charmoz, we
find the greatest exaggeration of, and therefore I suppose the greatest
interest in, the narrow and spiry point on its left side. That is in
reality a point at all but a hatchet edge; a flake of rock, which is
enabled to maintain itself in this sharp-edged state by its writhing
folds of sinewy granite. Its structure, on a larger scale, and seen
"edge on," is shown in Fig. 41. The whole aiguille is composed of a
series of such flakes, liable, indeed, to all kinds of fissure in other
directions, but holding, by their modes of vertical association, the
strongest authority over the form of the whole mountain. It is not in
all lights that they are seen plainly: for instance, in the morning
effect in Plate +30+ they are hardly traceable: but the longer we watch,
the more they are perceived; and their power of sustaining themselves
vertically is so great, that at the foot of the aiguille on the right a
few of them form a detached mass, known as the _Petit_ Charmoz, between
E and _c_ in Fig. 60, p. 210, of which the height of the uttermost
flake, between _c_ and _d_, is about five hundred feet.

[Illustration: FIG. 41.]

Important, however, as this curved cleavage is, it is so confused among
others, that it has taken me, as I said, ten years of almost successive
labor to develope, in any degree of completeness, its relations among
the aiguilles of Chamouni; and even of professed geologists, the only
person who has described it properly is De Saussure, whose _continual_
sojourn among the Alps enabled him justly to discern the constant from
the inconstant phenomena. And yet, in his very first journey to Savoy,
Turner saw it at a glance, and fastened on it as the main thing to be
expressed in those mountains.

In the opposite Plate (+32+), the darkest division, on the right, is a
tolerably accurate copy of Turner's rendering of the Aiguille Charmoz
(etched and engraved by himself), in the plate called the "Mer de
Glace," in the Liber Studiorum. Its outline is in local respects
inaccurate enough, being modified by Turnerian topography; but the flaky
character is so definite, that it looks as if it had been prepared for
an illustrative diagram of the points at present under discussion.

Sec. 23. And do not let it be supposed that th