. The White hills; their legends, landscape, and poetry. rtion than MountLafayette is, as a bunch on the planet itself. The thickness of asheet of writing paper on an artificial sphere a foot in diameter,represents the eminence of the mountain chains. They are no morethan the cracks in the varnish of such a ball. The roughnesses onthe skin of an Havana orange are more marked than Chimborazo,Kinchin-Junga, and the valley of the Jordan, are upon the yet these trifling elevations and scratches reveal the heights andsoundings of our knowledge of the planet. What do we know of the four th
. The White hills; their legends, landscape, and poetry. rtion than MountLafayette is, as a bunch on the planet itself. The thickness of asheet of writing paper on an artificial sphere a foot in diameter,represents the eminence of the mountain chains. They are no morethan the cracks in the varnish of such a ball. The roughnesses onthe skin of an Havana orange are more marked than Chimborazo,Kinchin-Junga, and the valley of the Jordan, are upon the yet these trifling elevations and scratches reveal the heights andsoundings of our knowledge of the planet. What do we know of the four thousand miles radius of the earth ?What do we know of the air above the highest mountain tops ? It THE WHITE HILLS. grows rarer as we ascend ; and but a few miles above the highest ofthe Himalayas, no doubt, there is blackness of darkness, except to aneye that should turn directly to the sun. The domain of light and ofknowledge lies within this petty film, whose top is nearly touched bythe little mountain heads that slightly roughen the roundness of the. world. Peel a pellicle from the planet, thinner in proportion than thethinnest of the laminae of an onion, and all our science and wisdom,and all life, too, will be stripped Yet, think of the uses of the little inequalities that we call moun-tains. Think of their service to the intellect. They are not excres-cences on the globes surface,—ridges of superfluous matter boltedupon the original smoothness of our orb. Many of our readers pos- THE PEMIGEWASSET VALLEY. 99 Bibly have seen pictures of mountains that look like mounds of putty,as though they had been stuck upon the landscape,—as though theyhad been thumbed into shape, and might be thumbed into any otherform. But the mountains were heaved up from the planets is in large measure by their help that the science of geology hasadvanced during the last century with rapid strides. They tell ussomething of what the earths crust is made of, and the texture andthick
Size: 1916px × 1304px
Photo credit: © The Reading Room / Alamy / Afripics
License: Licensed
Model Released: No
Keywords: ., bookcentury1800, bookdecade1870, booksubjectwhitemo, bookyear1876
