The soft and smooth mountains are generally formed of the schisti, when there is any considerable extent of such alpine or mountainous region.  The substance is sufficiently durable to form a mountain, or sufficiently strong, in its natural state, to resist the greatest torrent of water; at the same time this fissible substance generally decays so completely, when exposed to the atmosphere, as to leave no salient rock exposed by which to characterise the mountain.

Of this kind are the schisti of Wales, of Cumberland, of the isle of Man, and of the south of Scotland.  I do not say absolutely, that there is no other kind of material, besides the schisti which gives this species of mountain, but only that this is generally the case in alpine situations.  It may be also formed of any other substance which has solidity enough to remain in the form of mountains, and at same time not enough to form salient rocks.  Such, for example, is the chalk hills of the Isle of Wight and south of England.  But these are generally hills of an inferior height compared with our alpine schisti, and hardly deserve the term of mountain.

This material of our smooth green mountains may be termed an argillaceous schistus; it has generally calcareous veins, and is often fibrous in its structure resembling wood, instead of being slatey, which it is in general.  There is however another species of schistus, forming also the same sort of mountain; it is the micaceous quartzy schistus of the north of Scotland.  Now it must be evident that the character of those mountains arises from there being no part of those schisti that resists the influence of the atmosphere, in exfoliating and breaking into soil; and this soil is doubtless of different qualities, according to the nature of those schisti from which the soil is formed.

Such mountains are necessarily composed of rounded masses, and not formed of angular shapes.  They are covered with soil, which is more or less either stoney or tender, sterile or fertile, according to the materials which produce that soil.  The fertile mountains are green and covered with grass; the sterile mountains again are black, or covered with heath in our climates.

Thus we have a general character of smooth and rounded mountains; and also a distinction in that general character from the produce of the soil indicating the nature of the solid materials, as containing, either on the one hand calcareous and argillaceous substances, or, on the other, as only containing those that are micaceous and siliceous.

With regard again to the other species of mountain, which we have termed rocky, we must make a subdistinction of those which are regular, and those in which there is no regularity to be perceived.  It must be plain that it is only of those which have regularity that we can form a theory.  It is this, that the regularity in the shape of those mountains arises from the rock of the mountain being either on the one hand an uniform