Various

“ We are not safe with such a one. Away to your brigand comrades of the hills—lead the villain life you incline to—do what you will—but never cross this threshold again!’ My mother and Bianca, roused by the noise, now hurried fearfully into the room, and a glance at Ludovico’s horror-struck and supplicating posture, at the shattered box, and my father’s inflamed and convulsed countenance, was enough without words to inform them of the revolting truth. ”

“ In imagination I often make one of the reunited family, and at times, too, indulge the hope that the chances and changes of a shifting lot may some time enable me in very deed to look on old Girardi and his spouse, Carlo and the reformed Ludovico, the fair Bianca and the faithful Francesco, and claim a return in kind—an evening spent among their gleeful rural party—for the fellow-feeling I had the good fortune to conceive for the desolation, and the part I was privileged to take in abridging the banishment, of the Italian Organ Boy. ”

“ Must we reject the ice-transporting theory as insufficient, and stand in despair of ever finding a clue to our difficulties? Far from it: the very difficulty itself points to the true explanation. The northern or Scandinavian boulders are not mixed with the Alpine on the low grounds at the base of the Jura, and this circumstance shows us that there was a limit to the space over which these boulders were transported, and that limit was, probably, the result of the elevation at which the ocean then stood. ”

“ Rich and poor four or five times; once on the verge of ruin, yet opened a new source of wealth almost overflowing. Now to be broken in my pitch of pride, and nearly winged (unless good news should come) , because London chooses to be in an uproar, and in the tumult of bulls and bears, a poor inoffensive lion like myself is pushed to the wall. But what is to be the end of it? God knows; and so ends the catechism. Nobody in the end can lose a penny by me: that is one comfort. Men will think pride has had a fall. ”

“ He who could so basely forget every lesson of honesty he was taught from his childhood, who could plunder his poor sister of what we have painfully earned for her by the sweat of our brows, and doom her to hopelessness and life-long loneliness, to feed his own vile profligacy, would not scruple to dip his hand in blood, ay, in the blood of his household, for their inheritance. ”

“ They see with joy the beautiful pheasant and harmless partridge drop from their flight, weltering in their blood, or perhaps perishing with wounds and hunger, under the cover of some friendly thicket to which they have in vain retreated for safety; they triumph over the unsuspecting fish, whom they have decoyed by an insidious pretence of feeding, and drag him from his native element by a hook fixed to and tearing out his entrails ”

“ There may be yet those, who loving me, may love my dog, because it has been mine. I must end these gloomy forebodings, or I shall lose the tone of mind with which men should meet distress. I feel my dogs’ feet on my knees. ”

“ The St Lawrence is in winter low, and the ice on the shallows along both banks of the river is frozen into one connected mass by a temperature which often sinks to thirty degrees below zero, or sixty-two degrees below the freezing point. When the thaw sets in, these masses are raised up and floated away, and with them an extraordinary quantity of blocks and stones which had been encased by the frost in their substance. In like manner, anchors which for the security of the ship in winter had been fixed near the shore, were obliged to be cut out of the ice, or they would have been carried away. ”

“ May we not then shudder at the thought of that dreary future, in which, by some physical changes of the earth’s surface, according to the theory of Mr Lyell, the conditions of the earth’s superficial temperature may be reversed, and bring down upon the coasts of our ill-fated island those frost-bearing monsters to bite up every living thing by one common congelation; for we may well suppose, that long ere that dismal period our cold-dispelling fuel, turf, coal, and all, will have been utterly consumed. ”

“ Presuming, then, for an instant, that the fact is conceded, that at some ancient epoch the low lands of a large portion of the northern and southern hemispheres were under water, whilst the higher hills and mountains were covered with snow, and their gorges and valleys filled with glaciers, which on descending to the ocean carried with them fragments of rocks, and became as icebergs their carriers to distant regions, do we not obtain an explanation of the phenomena of boulders more simple and rational than any of those previously advanced? ”

“ Through what force and in what manner the deposition of large blocks on the surface of all those formations which are at the water’s brink even now happens, can be observed every spring, by any one who, at the breaking up of the ice, repairs to those parts of the coast where the shore bears testimony, by the numerous blocks heaped up one upon the other, of their forcible deposition. Near Kiwinjemei, on the Wwoxen, there is, as it were, a wall nine feet high, stretching along the flat shore, composed of blocks of stone which have been gradually raised by the masses of ice. ”

“ And in what branch of geological inquiry is such a multiplication of materials more required than in the one we have been discussing? Happy times, then, for science, morality, and religion, when a taste for research shall have been budded on the earliest shoot of man’s intelligence! ”

“ The long lines of drift and boulders extending from north to south in northern Europe were indeed in all probability the result of the joint operation of the marine current which moved onwards the floating ice, and of the ice itself. In these lines or trainées, two sets have been discovered—one crossing the other at a very acute angle, a circumstance which may possibly be explained by supposing two currents simultaneously running from the north being inflected by local peculiarities into slightly differing directions, and then, on meeting, proceeding in a direction the resultant of the two ”

“ Examples will indeed be quoted from other writers, but the comparative scarcity of transported matter on the upper surface of the fields of ice, seems a natural consequence of their mode and place of formation. Formed in bays or gulfs, some portions of them are broken off by the violence of the waves at a distance from the shore, and never therefore come in contact with rocks or stones; whilst others, grounding in shallow water, encase many in the substance of their lower surface, although none are seen on the upper. ”

“ My mother often wept: my sister’s cheek became wan and pale even with Francesco by her side: my own heart was faint and joyless: a cloud of spiritless sadness and depression settled over all, and every thing seemed to lament him who was far away among strangers, in loneliness and disgrace—him whose bold spirit, athletic form, and buoyant beauty, had, [Pg 300] notwithstanding his frailties, been the pride and glory, secret or avowed, of all. ”

“ The most polished are not ashamed to be pleased with scenes of barbarity, and, to the disgrace of human nature, to dignify them with the name of sports. They arm cocks with artificial weapons, which nature had kindly denied to their malevolence, and with shouts of applause and triumph see them plunge them into each other’s hearts ”

“ In like manner, how easily the granitic blocks of Scandinavia could by similar means have been transported across the Baltic!—and at the same time many of the phenomena of drift (a name now given by many geologists to what was formerly called diluvian) might be explained, as shown by Mr Lyell in his account of the Norfolk drift, by the action of floating fields of ice carrying with them sand and gravel, or grating and heaping up the sand and gravel of shoals on which they were beginning to ground, as shown in the examples cited. ”

“ The other erratic block or boulder of Kittelholm had been observed by the inhabitants in the winter of 1806 to shift its place, being dragged on by the ice for a distance of about one-third of a mile. But all these were carriers of small note and name when compared to those of vast bulk and power described by Scoresby. “Many,” says he, “of the icebergs contained strata of earth and stones, and some were loaded with beds of rock of great thickness, and weighing by calculation from 50,000 to 100,000 tons.” ”

“ The deposition of blocks depends therefore on the shore being accessible to ice-shoals driven in by winds or currents. Small blocks, also, are often cemented together by ice when the water over shallows, the bottoms of which are covered with loose stones, freezes; and when the water rises in the spring, or in consequence of storms setting in from the sea, the ice also rises, and with it the encased stones ”

“ Such accidents as those suggested by Mr Lyell have indeed occurred in the Alpine regions; rivers have been dammed up either by falling hill-sides or by falling masses of ice, and on bursting through these obstacles, have poured down in fearful destruction on the plain below. But how diminutive are such catastrophes in comparison to that which must have attended on the dispersion of the Alpine boulders! and although the lake of Wissmann’s hypothesis is sufficiently extensive to transport the boulders through a very wide space, it is insufficient to account for those in Franche-compté ”

“ I have the satisfaction to recollect that my prosperity has been of advantage to many, and to hope that some at least will forgive my transient wealth on account of the innocence of my intentions, and my real wish to do good to the poor. ”

“ A large portion, therefore, of field ice must necessarily float about unencumbered with rubbish or fragments of rocks. Boethlingk, in treating on the diluvial and alluvial formations of South Finland, incidentally touches upon this subject. “The dispersion,” he observes, “of these blocks, is very probably in accordance with a phenomenon which may be observed on many seas and rivers, and which depends on the presence of blocks of stone near the shore. ”

“ As a monastic ruin, the Abbey of Holy Cross ranks in popular esteem as one of the first, if not the very first, in Ireland. But though many of its architectural features are of remarkable beauty, it is perhaps as a whole scarcely deserving of so high a character ”

“ It is as a geological agent that we have now to contemplate ice in the various forms of fields and bergs, or of glaciers; its efficiency as a moving power being first considered. Scoresby justly denominates ice-fields “one of the wonders of the deep. They are often,” he says, “met with of the diameter of twenty or thirty miles; and when in a state of such close combination that no interstice can be seen, they sometimes extend to a length of fifty, or nearly a hundred miles.” ”

“ When two such banks lie one behind the other, at the same level, or successively like terraces, we are justified in concluding that the level of the water has changed and the land been increased, or that the one has sunk and the other in consequence advanced upon it. In confined basins this sinking may have been the consequence of the outlet widening by wear, and in open seas by the upheaving of the land. On all the large lakes of Finland are seen banks and terraces, as well as single blocks of stone, on the slopes. ”

“ Such, then, are the facts on which modern geologists, and more especially Mr Lyell, have founded the theory of ice-transported boulders, appealing to the experience of that which is now occurring in existing seas as evidence of that which did occur in seas not now existing—seas which once covered or at least rose to the level of places which exhibit these relics of their presence. ”

“ The conditions, indeed, which are necessary to ensure a load for the carrying ice, such as proximity to the rocks the detached fragments of which are to rest on its surface, are more peculiarly present in ice formed under or brought into contact with precipitous rocky banks, and in that formed in deep narrow gulfs—in short, in ice constituted after the manner of glaciers. ”

“ In this way it is very probable that the boulders which lie scattered over the surface of the countries south of the Baltic were transported from Scandinavia and Finland on ice-shoals, at a time when the East Sea yet spread over those regions. Banks also are thrown up along the shore by the ice; they are never composed of large stones, but on flat sandy shores principally of sand. ”

“ Such a union of the two modes of transport, combined with sea currents, seems at once consistent with reason and efficient in explanation; for example, it explains the difficulty experienced in understanding the ancient glaciers of the northern face of our Dublin mountains, where we see limestone gravel and fragments of red sandstone accumulated against their base up to a certain point where they end abruptly, and gravel of primitive rocks begins. ”

“ Some of them were not less than two miles square, and 250 to 300 feet above the water, and consequently about 2000 feet thick. It is remarkable that this phenomenon occurred from 85 degrees west longitude, at a considerable distance from any land, to the meridian of Cape Pillar, while the immediate coasts of Chili and Cape Horn offered [Pg 302] no trace of them. The winter was comparatively mild, which might indeed account for the liberation of such large masses of ice from the South Pole, and their being wafted into seas usually quite free from them. ”

“ How live a poor indebted man, where I was once the wealthy—the honoured. I was to have gone there on Saturday in joy and prosperity to receive my friends. My dogs will wait for me in vain. It is foolish ”

“ He adopted a style of paper-hangings executed with blocks in chiaro oscuro, in imitation of the most celebrated classic subjects.
To use his words, “The persons who cannot purchase the statues themselves, may have these prints in their places, and thus effectually show their taste. ’Tis the choice and not the price which discovers the true taste of the possessor; and thus the Apollo Belvedere, the Medicean Venus, or the Dying Gladiator, may be disposed of in niches, or surrounded with a mosaic work in imitation of frames, or with festoons and garlands of flowers, with great taste and elegance ”