The Crown of Wild Olive
MARY. And what is it made of?
L. A little of everything; there's always flint, and clay, and magnesia
in it; and the black is iron, according to its fancy; and there's
boracic acid, if you know what that is; and if you don't, I cannot tell
you to-day; and it doesn't signify; and there's potash, and soda; and,
on the whole, the chemistry of it is more like a mediaeval doctor's
prescription, than the making of a respectable mineral: but it may,
perhaps, be owing to the strange complexity of its make, that it has a
notable habit which makes it, to me, one of the most interesting of
minerals. You see these two crystals are broken right across, in many
places, just as if they had been shafts of black marble fallen from a
ruinous temple; and here they lie, imbedded in white quartz, fragment
succeeding fragment, keeping the line of the original crystal, while the
quartz fills up the intervening spaces. Now tourmaline has a trick of
doing this, more than any other mineral I know: here is another bit
which I picked up on the glacier of Macugnaga; it is broken, like a
pillar built of very flat broad stones, into about thirty joints, and
all these are heaved and warped away from each other sideways, almost
into a line of steps; and then all is filled up with quartz paste. And
here, lastly, is a green Indian piece, in which the pillar is first
disjointed, and then wrung round into the shape of an S.
MARY. How _can_ this have been done?
L. There are a thousand ways in which it may have been done; the
difficulty is not to account for the doing of it; but for the showing of
it in some crystals, and not in others. You never by any chance get a
quartz crystal broken or twisted in this way. If it break or twist at
all, which it does sometimes, like the spire of Dijon, it is by its own
will or fault; it never seems to have been passively crushed. But, for
the forces which cause this passive ruin of the tourmaline,--here is a
stone which will show you multitudes of them in operation at once. It is
known as 'brecciated agate,' beautiful, as you see; and highly valued as
a pebble: yet, so far as I can read or hear, no one has ever looked at
it with the least attention. At the first glance, you see it is made of
very fine red striped agates, which have been broken into small pieces,
and fastened together again by paste, also of agate. There would be
nothing wonderful in this, if this were all. It is well known that by
the movements of strata, portions of rock are often shattered to
pieces:--well known also that agate is a deposit of flint by water under
certain conditions of heat and pressure: there is, therefore, nothing
wonderful in an agate's being broken; and nothing wonderful in its
being mended with the solution out of which it was itself originally
congealed. And with this explanation, most people, looking at a
brecciated agate, or brecciated anything, seem to be satisfied. I was so
myself, for twenty years; but, lately happening to stay for some time at
the Swiss Baden, where the beach of the Limmat is almost wholly composed
of brecciated limestones, I began to examine them thoughtfully; and
perceived, in the end, that they were, one and all, knots of as rich
mystery as any poor little human brain was ever lost in. That piece of
agate in your hand, Mary, will show you many of the common phenomena of
breccias; but you need not knit your brows over it in that way; depend
upon it, neither you nor I shall ever know anything about the way it was
made, as long as we live.
DORA. That does not seem much to depend upon.
L. Pardon me, puss. When once we gain some real notion of the extent and
the unconquerableness of our ignorance, it is a very broad and restful
thing to depend upon: you can throw yourself upon it at ease, as on a
cloud, to feast with the gods. You do not thenceforward trouble
yourself,--nor any one else,--with theories, or the contradiction of
theories; you neither get headache nor heartburning; and you never more
waste your poor little store of strength, or allowance of time.
However, there are certain facts, about this agate-making, which I can
tell you; and then you may look at it in a pleasant wonder as long as
you like; pleasant wonder is no loss of time.
First, then, it is not broken freely by a blow; it is slowly wrung, or
ground, to pieces. You can only with extreme dimness conceive the force
exerted on mountains in transitional states of movement. You have all
read a little geology; and you know how coolly geologists talk of
mountains being raised or depressed. They talk coolly of it, because
they are accustomed to the fact; but the very universality of the fact
prevents us from ever conceiving distinctly the conditions of force
involved. You know I was living last year in Savoy; my house was on the
back of a sloping mountain which rose gradually for two miles, behind
it; and then fell at once in a great precipice towards Geneva, going
down three thousand feet in four or five cliffs, or steps. Now that
whole group of cliffs had simply been torn away by sheer strength from
the rocks below, as if the whole mass had been as soft as biscuit. Put
four or five captains' biscuits on the floor, on the top of one another;
and try to break them all in half, not by bending, but by holding one
half down, and tearing the other halves straight up;--of course you will
not be able to do it, but you will feel and comprehend the sort of force
needed. Then, fancy each captains' biscuit a bed of rock, six or seven
hundred feet thick; and the whole mass torn straight through; and one
half heaved up three thousand feet, grinding against the other as it
rose,--and you will have some idea of the making of the Mont Saleve.
MAY. But it must crush the rocks all to dust!
L. No; for there is no room for dust. The pressure is too great;
probably the heat developed also so great that the rock is made partly
ductile; but the worst of it is, that we never can see these parts of
mountains in the state they were left in at the time of their elevation;
for it is precisely in these rents and dislocations that the crystalline
power principally exerts itself. It is essentially a styptic power, and
wherever the earth is torn, it heals and binds; nay, the torture and
grieving of the earth seem necessary to bring out its full energy; for
you only find the crystalline living power fully in action, where the
rents and faults are deep and many.
DORA. If you please, sir,--would you tell us--what are 'faults'?
L. You never heard of such things?
DORA. Never in all our lives.
L. When a vein of rock which is going on smoothly, is interrupted by
another troublesome little vein, which stops it, and puts it out, so
that it has to begin again in another place--that is called a fault. _I_
always think it ought to be called the fault of the vein that interrupts
it; but the miners always call it the fault of the vein that is
interrupted.
DORA. So it is, if it does not begin again where it left off.
L. Well, that is certainly the gist of the business: but, whatever
good-natured old lecturers may do, the rocks have a bad habit, when they
are once interrupted, of never asking 'Where was I?'
DORA. When the two halves of the dining table came separate, yesterday,
was that a 'fault'?
L. Yes; but not the table's. However, it is not a bad illustration,
Dora. When beds of rock are only interrupted by a fissure, but remain at
the same level, like the two halves of the table, it is not called a
fault, but only a fissure; but if one half of the table be either tilted
higher than the other, or pushed to the side, so that the two parts will
not fit, it is a fault. You had better read the chapter on faults in
Jukes's Geology; then you will know all about it. And this rent that I
am telling you of in the Saleve, is one only of myriads, to which are
owing the forms of the Alps, as, I believe, of all great mountain
chains. Wherever you see a precipice on any scale of real magnificence,
you will nearly always find it owing to some dislocation of this kind;
but the point of chief wonder to me, is the delicacy of the touch by
which these gigantic rents have been apparently accomplished. Note,
however, that we have no clear evidence, hitherto, of the time taken to
produce any of them. We know that a change of temperature alters the
position and the angles of the atoms of crystals, and also the entire
bulk of rocks. We know that in all volcanic, and the greater part of all
subterranean, action, temperatures are continually changing, and
therefore masses of rock must be expanding or contracting, with infinite
slowness, but with infinite force. This pressure must result in
mechanical strain somewhere, both in their own substance, and in that of
the rocks surrounding them; and we can form no conception of the result
of irresistible pressure, applied so as to rend and raise, with
imperceptible slowness of gradation, masses thousands of feet in
thickness. We want some experiments tried on masses of iron and stone;
and we can't get them tried, because Christian creatures never will
seriously and sufficiently spend money, except to find out the shortest
ways of killing each other. But, besides this slow kind of pressure,
there is evidence of more or less sudden violence, on the same terrific
scale; and, through it all, the wonder, as I said, is always to me the
delicacy of touch. I cut a block of the Saleve limestone from the edge
of one of the principal faults which have formed the precipice; it is a
lovely compact limestone, and the fault itself is filled up with a red
breccia formed of the crushed fragments of the torn rock, cemented by a
rich red crystalline paste. I have had the piece I cut from it smoothed,
and polished across the junction; here it is; and you may now pass your
soft little fingers over the surface, without so much as feeling the
place where a rock which all the hills of England might have been sunk
in the body of, and not a summit seen, was torn asunder through that
whole thickness, as a thin dress is torn when you tread upon it.
(_The audience examine the stone, and touch it timidly; but
the matter remains inconceivable to them._)
MARY (_struck by the beauty of the stone_). But this is almost marble?
L. It is quite marble. And another singular point in the business, to my
mind, is that these stones, which men have been cutting into slabs, for
thousands of years, to ornament their principal buildings with,--and
which, under the general name of 'marble,' have been the delight of the
eyes, and the wealth of architecture, among all civilised nations,--are
precisely those on which the signs and brands of these earth agonies
have been chiefly struck; and there is not a purple vein nor flaming
zone in them, which is not the record of their ancient torture. What a
boundless capacity for sleep, and for serene stupidity, there is in the
human mind! Fancy reflective beings, who cut and polish stones for three
thousand years, for the sake of the pretty stains upon them; and educate
themselves to an art at last (such as it is), of imitating these veins
by dexterous painting; and never a curious soul of them, all that while,
asks, 'What painted the rocks?'
(_The audience look dejected, and ashamed of themselves._)
The fact is, we are all, and always, asleep, through our lives; and it
is only by pinching ourselves very hard that we ever come to see, or
understand, anything. At least, it is not always we who pinch ourselves;
sometimes other people pinch us; which I suppose is very good of
them,--or other things, which I suppose is very proper of them. But it
is a sad life; made up chiefly of naps and pinches.
(_Some of the audience, on this, appearing to think that the