ard. In the course of ages--if nothing unforeseen occurs meanwhile
to prevent it--the Alpine mud will have filled in the entire Adriatic;
and the Ionian Isles will spring like isolated mountain ridges from the
Adriatic plain, as the Euganean hills--those 'mountains Euganean' where
Shelley 'stood listening to the paean with which the legioned rocks did
hail the sun's uprise majestical'--spring in our own time from the dead
level of Lombardy. Once they in turn were the Euganean islands, and
even now to the trained eye of the historical observer they stand up
island-like from the vast green plain that spreads flat around them.

Perhaps it seems to you a rather large order to be asked to believe
that Lombardy and Venetia are nothing more than an outspread sheet of
deep Alpine mud. Well, there is nothing so good for incredulity, don't
you know, as capping the climax. If a man will not swallow an inch of
fact, the best remedy is to make him gulp down an ell of it. And,
indeed, the Lombard plain is but an insignificant mud flat compared
with the vast alluvial plains of Asiatic and American rivers. The
alluvium of the Euphrates, of the Mississippi, of the Hoang Ho, of the
Amazons would take in many Lombardies and half-a-dozen Venetias without
noticing the addition. But I will insist upon only one example--the
rivers of India, which have formed the gigantic deep mud flat of the
Ganges and the Jumna, one of the very biggest on earth, and that
because the Himalayas are the highest and newest mountain chain exposed
to denudation. For, as we saw foreshadowed in the case of the Alps and
Apennines, the bigger the mountains on which we can draw the greater
the resulting mass of alluvium. The Rocky Mountains give rise to the
Missouri (which is the real Mississippi); the Andes give rise to
Amazons and the La Plata; the Himalayas give rise to the Ganges and the
Indus. Great mountain, great river, great resulting mud sheet.

At a very remote period, so long ago that we cannot reduce it to any
common measure with our modern chronology, the southern table-land of
India--the Deccan, as we call it--formed a great island like Australia,
separated from the continent of Asia by a broad arm of the sea which
occupied what is now the great plain of Bengal, the North-West, and the
Punjaub. This ancient sea washed the foot of the Himalayas, and spread
south thence for 600 miles to the base of the Vindhyas. But the
Himalayas are high and clad with giga