Omline of Mountains on north side of i.och Hourn, opposite Barris dil

(to shew the spiry forms assumed by some of the higher eminences of the gucissose & schistose rocks, The lower rocks are ice-worn)

rock seem there piled upon each other, giving a corrugated outline to the steep acclivities that rise up into an array of grey serrated ridges and deep corries, over which tower the peaks of Glenelg. Less accessible, but not less striking examples of the same savage scenery, may be found along the shores of Loch Hourn (Plate III.) and Loch Nevis. The height and the angular spiry forms of the mountain ridges, the steep and deeply rifted slopes, and the ruggedness and sterility of the whole landscape, distinguish these two sea-lochs from the rest of the fiords of the west coast.

Amid such scenes as these, the influence of the stratification and joints of the gneiss and schist on the decomposition of the rocks can be traced by a geological eye far along the summits and slopes of the mountains. To this influence are due those parallel clefts which give rise to dark rifts down the steep scarps, and to deep angular notches on the crests of the ridges. To the same cause also, combined with the unequal waste that arises from varieties in the texture of the rocks, we may ascribe that gnarled craggy contour so characteristic of the gneissose hills of the Highlands, as well as the frequent tendency of the summits to assume spiry forms. Sometimes a whole mountain has been worn into a conical shape, but more frequently it is along the crests or at the ends of ridges that this outline

occurs, and the reason seems to be that the gneiss is usually too various in its texture and the rate of its decomposition to allow of the formation of a great cone like those of quartz-rock, while it is nevertheless uniform enough over lesser areas to give rise to small cones and spires along the summit of a mountain ridge.

Again, the influence of the internal structure of gneiss and mica-schist upon the rocky foregrounds of a Highland landscape must be familiar to many a visitor of the north. The mingling of mouldering knolls with rough angular rocks, the vertical rifts that gape on the face of crag and cliff as if they had been rent open by an earthquake, the strange twisted crumpled lines of the stratification, the blending of white bands of quartz with dark streaks of hornblende that vary the prevailing grey or brown or pink hue of the stone, the silvery sheen of the mica and the glance of the felspar or the garnets, the crusts of grey and yellow lichen or of green velvet-like moss, the tufts of fern and foxglove that rise above the clustered wild-flowers, the bushes of deep purple heather, and the trailing briars-these are features which we recognise at once as distinctively and characteristically Highland. With all deference I would urge upon our landscape painters the propriety of studying these details of rock scenery more than they have yet done. It is not as a mere mass

Geological structure and Landscape-painting.

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of light and shade thrown into the foreground to give depth and distance to the picture that a group of rocks and boulders is faithfully rendered on canvass. There is an individuality even about the boulders, to which no conventional style of treatment can at all do justice. And no man will truly paint these features unless he is content patiently and lovingly to study them-a task which, I doubt not, he will find very pleasant in practice and eminently beneficial in result.1

1 In the recent exhibition of the Royal Scottish Academy (1865) no feature struck me more than the conventionality of the Scottish artists in the painting of rocks. One of the more noted of their number is content to mottle the foreground of his Highland landscapes with lumps of umber and white, worked up indeed into the external outline of rocks and stones, but utterly without character. It seemed strange that in an exhibition containing so many pictures with Highland scenes as subjects, there should scarcely be one which showed that the painter had tried to study the individuality of rock-masses and boulders, over and above that of hills and mountains. In painful contrast to the work of the living artists was the picture of Pegwell Bay, by the late W. Dyce, R.A. -a work in which the geological structure of a chalk-cliff, not in itself a very attractive subject, was given with all the fidelity of a photograph, but with a poetry of tone and colour such as no photograph can give. The worn floor of chalk on the beach was admirably rendered, and the scattered stones were so well characterized that one could as easily pick out the large fractured flints from the rolled pieces of chalk as he could do on the beach itself. Yet this accuracy was not obtained at the expense of breadth and symmetry of treatment. It shows that, without descending to mere servile copying, a great addition of variety may be obtained for the foreground of a picture by a careful study of the structural forms of rocks. Mr. Ruskin's eloquent pages on this subject are familiar to every one. The most remarkable sketches of rock-scenery which I have