te science is to make the possessor of it look
for, and eminently see, the things connected with his special pieces of
knowledge; and as all accurate science must be sternly limited, his
sight of nature gets limited accordingly. I observed that all our young
figure-painters were rendered, to all intents and purposes, _blind_ by
their knowledge of anatomy. They saw only certain muscles and bones, of
which they had learned the positions by rote, but could not, on account
of the very prominence in their minds of these bits of fragmentary
knowledge, see the real movement, color, rounding, or any other subtle
quality of the human form. And I was quite sure that if I examined the
mountain anatomy scientifically, I should go wrong, in like manner,
touching the external aspects. Therefore in beginning the inquiries of
which the results are given in the preceding pages, I closed all
geological books, and set myself, as far as I could, to see the Alps in
a simple, thoughtless, and untheorizing manner; but to _see_ them, if it
might be, thoroughly. If I am wrong in any of the statements made after
this kind of examination, the very fact of this error is an interesting
one, as showing the kind of deception which the external aspects of
hills are calculated to induce in an unprejudiced observer; but, whether
wrong or right, I believe the results I have given are those which
naturally would strike an artist, and _ought_ to strike him, just as the
apparently domical form of the sky, and radiation of the sun's light,
ought to be marked by him as pictorial phenomena, though the sky is not
domical, and though the radiation of sunbeams is a perspective
deception. There are, however, one or two points on which my opinions
might seem more adverse to the usual positions of geologists than they
really are, owing to my having left out many _qualifying_ statements for
fear of confusing the reader. These I must here briefly touch upon. And,
first, I know that I shall be questioned for not having sufficiently
dwelt upon slaty cleavages running transversely across series of beds,
and for generally speaking as if the slaty crystalline rocks were merely
dried beds of micaceous sand, in which the flakes of mica naturally lay
parallel with the beds, or only at such an angle to them as is
constantly assumed by particles of drift. Now the reason of this is
simply that my own mountain experience has led me _always_ among rocks
which induced such an impress