spiritual and things temporal alike, our modern mania is to carry with us our own life, instead of accepting that which we find on the spot. Alpine touring has become a highly-organized institution, brought to perfection by everything that administrative genius, capital, and science can give. All the inscriptions on the votive offerings discovered around the ruins of the Temple of Jupiter Penninus on the Great St. Bernard, and which come down to the latest periods of the Roman Empire, are filled with warm expression of gratitude for having escaped the extraordinary perils of the passage. Even in the days of Pliny, several hundred years after the first passage of the Alps by the Roman troops, and even after the establishment of a station at Sion, in the Valais, it was spoken of as a “most hidden part of the earth, in the region of perpetual night, amid forests forever inaccessible to human approach.” The courage, skill, and ingenuity of man have overcome all these formidable dangers. Though the mountains are still lofty and precipitous, safe and convenient passes have been found practicable, and paths have been contrived, upon these giddy heights, over which the maiden threads without a thought of danger. The rushing torrents are loud and furious in the descent to the valley; but they have been bridged over by stone and timber, or perhaps by the fallen pine, and the peasant boy sings cheerily, as he strides across the foaming stream. Steam and electricity make the railway train emulate the agility of the chamois, and carry the public across precipices to a height of seven thousand feet. There is scarcely a point of view that attracts tourists, a summit that climbers make fashionable, but at once the mountain is rent and insulted; it is stripped of its beautiful forests, iron rails are screwed to its wounded and bleeding side, and you are carried up like a bundle of luggage, with no roadside halts under the trees, no flowers gathered by the wayside, no rustic inns hidden under the firs, but all along station-masters, ticket-collectors, and stations; or _chaises-à-porteur_, and long lines of mules file up the Alps, carrying Saratoga trunks and cases of Clicquot to the level of the eternal snows. Mountain summits are no longer reserved for those who arrogantly pride themselves on superior soundness of wind and limb, but are equally accessible to the blind, halt, and lame. The circular-tour ticket has brought these summits within reach of everybody’s purse and everybody’s legs. Greed of gain and competition are rapidly producing the effect of false mountains, sham mountains, built by contractors and shareholders; a mountain at a fair that the people ascend a franc for the round trip; where the tourist is nothing but a number, and is always dining between two trains, at the buffet of an international railway station. There is a tendency all the world over to the loss of the true sense of natural