beauty; and forest solitudes and quiet valleys must retreat before the spirit of Mammon, and succumb to factories and foundries. Yet are not the natural beauties of a country an inestimable treasure to it, and, from a business view, is it wise, lightly to give away what money cannot buy, nor modern art create? With commercial and economic disadvantages difficult to overcome, it would appear the wiser policy for Switzerland to check the rapid transformation of the beautiful and the venerable into cheap and tasteless novelties, with their cast-iron uninterestingness. Nature has done all for Switzerland, from its pure and radiant air to its mountains, lakes, and wild flowers, which spring up as though Aphrodite were still there, “to sow them with her odorous feet.” This marvellous and rare beauty of nature is too often taken as a matter of course, and “holy men, in recommending of the love of God to us, refer but seldom to those things in which it is most abundantly and immediately shown; though they insist much on His giving of bread and raiment and health, they require us not to thank Him for that glory of His works which He has permitted us alone to perceive; they tell us often to meditate in the closet, but they send us not, like Isaac, into the fields at even.” Fortunately, the grandeur of Alpine scenery cannot be altogether destroyed, though seriously injured, by the spade, the pickaxe, and the blasting-powder. There is a poetry of science, even of practical science, and the invaluable and ubiquitous engineer cannot after all do much to the everlasting hills, except here and there a simple climb may be made simpler still, and an opening effected through what looks like one of the permanent barriers of the world. The physical geography of Switzerland is still a stupendous unit. Man may enormously modify its surface, but its original conditions remain dominant, forcing a stern recognition of their supremacy; mountain-ranges may be passed or surmounted; they have never yet been lowered or removed; Switzerland will ever be mastered by its sublime physical features. While much of the simplicity which was formerly the attraction of the country has passed away, never to be restored, still it presents an unrivalled scene, in picturesque combination, with advantages of atmospheric relief, and aided by the contributing glories of a luminous and sensitive sky. There is beauty of every sort; beauties to enrapture every sense; beauties to satisfy every taste; forms the grandest and loveliest; colors the most gorgeous and the most delicate; harmonies the most soothing and the most stirring; the sunny glories of the day; the pale grace of moonlight; the silent pinnacles of aged snows; tropical luxuriance; the serenity of peerless sunsets; the sublimity of unchallenged storms; pomp of summits and world of clouds; witchery of water, sky, and mountain; a very cluster of delights and grandeurs, to