l falling towards the glacier on one
side, and to the lower Riffel on the other, four or five hundred feet,
not, indeed, in unbroken precipice, but in a form quite incapable of
being scaled.[84]

[Illustration: FIG. 79.]

Sec. 10. To return to the Cervin. The view of it given on the left hand in
Plate +38+ shows the ridge in about its narrowest profile; and shows
also that this ridge is composed of beds of rock shelving across it,
apparently horizontal, or nearly so, at the top, and sloping
considerably southwards (to the spectator's left), at the bottom. How
far this slope is a consequence of the advance of the nearest angle
giving a steep perspective to the beds, I cannot say; my own belief
would have been that a great deal of it is thus deceptive, the beds
lying as the tiles do in the somewhat anomalous, but perfectly
conceivable house-roof, Fig. 79. Saussure, however, attributes to the
beds themselves a very considerable slope. But be this as it may, the
main facts of the thinness of the beds, their comparative horizontality,
and the daring swordsweep by which the whole mountain has been hewn out
of them, are from this spot comprehensible at a glance. Visible, I
_should_ have said; but eternally, and to the uttermost,
_in_comprehensible. Every geologist who speaks of this mountain seems
to be struck by the wonderfulness of its calm sculpture--the absence of
all aspect of convulsion, and yet the stern chiselling of so vast a mass
into its precipitous isolation leaving no ruin nor debris near it.
"Quelle force n'a-t-il pas fallu," exclaims M. Saussure, "pour rompre,
et pour _balayer_ tout ce qui manque a cette pyramide!" "What an
overturn of all ancient ideas in Geology," says Professor Forbes, "to
find a pinnacle of 15,000 feet high [above the sea] sharp as a pyramid,
and with perpendicular precipices of thousands of feet on every hand, to
be a representative of the older chalk formation; and what a difficulty
to conceive the nature of a convulsion (even with unlimited power),
which could produce a configuration like the Mont Cervin rising from the
glacier of Zmutt!"

[Illustration: FIG 80.]

Sec. 11. The term "perpendicular" is of course applied by the Professor in
the "poetical" temper of Reynolds,--that is to say, in one "inattentive
to minute exactness in details;" but the effect of this strange
Matterhorn upon the imagination is indeed so great, that even the
gravest philosophers cannot resist it; and Profe