Car comment ne resteroit-il aucun vestige de cette montagne?  On concoit bien que sa tete auroit pu se detruire, mais son corps, la base du moins, protegee par les debris de sa tete accumules autour d’elle qu’est ce qui auroit pu l’aneantir; d’ailleurs les parois interieures du cirque quoique tres-escarpees ne sont pourtant pas verticale; elles s’avancent de tous cotes vers l’interieur; et le fond, le milieu meme du cirque n’est point du granit, il est de la meme nature que ses bords.  Enfin nous avons reconnu que les montagnes qui forment la couronne du Mont-Rose se prolongent au dehors a de grandes distances en sorte que leur ensemble forme une masse incomparablement plus grande que celle qui auroit rempli le vuide interieur du cirque.

“Il faut donc reconnoitre, comme tous les phenomenes le demontrent d’ailleurs, qu’il existe de montagnes de roches feuilletees, composees des memes elemens que le granit, et qui sont sorties comme lui des mains de la nature sans avoir commence par etres elles-memes des granits[22].”

[Footnote 22:  M. de Saussure, upon the evidence before us, might have gone farther, and maintained that the masses of granite, which here traverse the strata in form of veins and irregular blocks, had been truly of a posterior formation.  But this is a subject which we shall have afterwards to consider in a particular manner; and then this example must be recollected.]

Here is an example the most interesting that can be imagined.  Those mountains are the highest in Europe, and their lofty peaks are altogether inaccessible upon one side.  They had all been formed of the same horizontal strata.  How then have they become separated peaks?  And how have the valleys been hollowed out of this immense mass of elevated country?—­No otherwise than as we may perceive it, upon every mountain, and after every flood.  It is not often indeed, that, in those alpine regions, any considerable tract of country is to be found, where an example so convincing is exhibited.  It is more common for those mountains of primary strata or schistus to rise up in ridges, which, though divided into great pyramids, may still be perceived as connected in the direction of their erected strata.  These last, although affording the most satisfactory view of that mineral operation by which land, formed and consolidated at the bottom of the sea, had been elevated and displaced, are not so proper to inform us of the amazing waste of those extremely consolidated bodies, as are those where the strata have preserved their original horizontal portion.  It is in this last case, that there are data remaining for calculating the minimum of the waste that must have been made of those mountains, by the regular and long continued operations of the atmospheric elements upon the surface of this earth.