CHAPTER i.
The impression produced by the beauty, grandeur, or sublimity of a chain of lofty moun-tains, is ordinarily unaccompanied by a sense of their vast importance in the entire economyof the globe. Contemplated, indeed, when these eminences are attired in their beautifulverdure, when they appear dotted with human habitations, or when flocks graze ontheir sides, the idea of their utility may be apparent, especially when the marks of cultureare scattered over their surface. But when they lift their bare summits to the cold,clear sky ; when they are wrapped in a mantle of drifted snow; when a dense mistrenders them invisible; when their scanty clothing is a poor and stunted herbage; andwhen there is no trace either of the feet of animals, or the traversings and toils of humankind ;—then the only purpose of these immense elevations, as they tower aloft from therich and fertile plain, appears to be to add a charm of loveliness or majesty to the scene,as the light fades on their azure coverings, as they are radiant in the sunshine, or theyare thickly veiled by the storm.
And yet, “ God is on the mountains,” scattering there and around, with all hismunificence, his rich and precious gifts on the children of men. Had they not existed,and had the earth’s surface presented only one mass of granite or lava, the limestone,clay, and sandstone, now so admirably intermixed to secure the beauty and fertility ofthe globe, and the welfare of man as its inhabitant, would have found no place; whilethe inestimable treasures of minerals, salt, and coal, would have been wholly inaccessible,and of all these essential elements of industry and civilisation we should have beenutterly destitute.
The mountain-ranges—ah immense and exhaustless depository of instruments forman’s advancement in the scale of being—are as certainly bulwarks of defence to theoutspreading valley and the plain. For when his lot is cast on the face of countriesnear the poles, they form a grateful screen from blasts of fatal bitterness; and when
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