To return: our examination commences with the Plutonic rocks, so called in memory of the well-known mythological god of the fiery or infernal regions; and we take _granite_[14] as a type of these rocks, because it is so familiar to all our readers. There are besides granite, syenite,[15] greenstone, porphyry, basalt, and others, to dilate upon which would defeat our purpose. Our object is to lay but a little at a time upon the memory, and to let that little be well digested before we pass from the thoroughly known to the unknown. Nothing but actual examination can make the student familiar with the varieties of the rocks of this very ancient epoch in the world’s history. Well, everybody knows what granite is; they see it on the kerb-stones of the wayside, in the hard paving of the London streets, in the massive slabs of London and Waterloo Bridges, and elsewhere. “Granite!” exclaims the reader, “everybody knows what granite is, and there is an end of it; you make as much fuss about granite as Wordsworth did about his well-known primrose, and the man who could see nothing but a primrose in a primrose.” But there is a poetry and a history about granite upon which we are going to dwell. This piece of granite which I hold in my hand is composed of quartz, mica, and feldspar.[16] The quartz is white and hard—I can’t scratch it with my knife; the mica is in glistening plates or scales; and the feldspar is soft and greyish, and can easily be scratched. Oh, if this granite could speak, what a story could it tell! “To give it, then, a tongue were wise in man.” Let us try. “Once upon a time, long, long ages ago, incalculable periods before Adam was placed in possession of Eden, I, the granite, and my contemporaries, came into being. Before us, this planet ‘was without form and void.’ A dark chaotic period, of which I know nothing, preceded me. When I first emerged into being, at the command of Him who laid the foundations of the earth, this world was a barren, lifeless, uncultivated, uninhabited, untrodden, seasonless waste. Here and there were undulations of land and water, but all was bare, desolate, and silent: not a moss nor a lichen covered the ancient skeleton of the globe; not a sea-weed floated in the broad ocean; not a trace existed even of the least highly organized animal or vegetable; everything was still, and with the stillness of universal death. The earth was prepared, and the fiat of creation had gone forth; but there was no inhabitant, and no beings endowed with life had been introduced to perform their part in the great mystery of creation.”[17] And the granite might go on to say—“Man! of three-score years and ten, where wast _thou_ when He, my Maker and yours, laid the foundations of the earth? Let me tell you what an important part I have played in the history of your world’s formation. I rise to the highest elevations, and form the sublimest pinnacles on the surface of the