nos must be
mentioned as a cause. By means of a volcano, a mountain may be raised
in a plain, and a volcanic mountain might even rise out of the sea.
The formation of this species of mountain requires not the wearing
operations of the earth which we have been considering as the modifier
of our alpine regions. This volcanic mountain has a conical shape,
perhaps more from the manner of its formation which is accretion, than
from the wasting of the surface of the earth. It is not, however, of
this particular specie of mountain that I mean to treat, having had no
opportunity of examining any of that species.

The genus of mountain which we are now considering, is that of the
eruptive kind. But there is much of this eruptive matter in the bowels
of the earth, which, so far as we know, never has produced a volcano. It
is to this species of eruption that I am now to attribute the formation
of many insulated mountains, which rise in what may be termed low
countries, in opposition to the highlands or alpine situations. Such is
Wrekin in Shropshire, which some people have supposed to have been a
volcano. Such are the hundred little mountains in the lowlands of this
country of Scotland, where those insulated hills are often called by the
general term _Law_; as, for example, North Berwick Law.

When masses of fluid matter are erupted in the mineral regions among
strata which are to form our land; and when those elevated strata are,
in the course of time, wasted and washed away, the solid mass of those
erupted substances, being more durable than the surrounding strata,
stand up as eminences in our land. Now these often, almost always, form
the small insulated mountains which are found so frequently breaking out
in the lowlands of Scotland. They appear in various shapes as well as
sizes; and they hold their particular form from the joint operation of
two different causes; one is the extent and casual shape of the erupted
mass; the other is the degradation of that mass, which is wasted by the
influences of the atmosphere, though wasted slower than the strata with
which it was involved.

When the formation of this erupted mass has been determined by the
place in any regular form, which may be distinguished in the shape of a
mountain, it gives a certain character which is often not difficult to
read. Thus, our whin-stone, interjected in flat beds between the
regular strata, often presents its edge upon, or near the summit of our
inso