1. The following book is the fulfilment, by one of the best and dearest of those Oxford pupils to whom I have referred in the close of my lectures given in Oxford this year, of a task which I set myself many and many a year ago, and had been obliged, by the infirmities of age, with deep regret to abandon. The regret is ended now, for the work is here done in a completeness which, among my mixed objects of study, it could never have received at my hands.

2. The subject of the sculpture of mountains into the forms of perpetual beauty which they miraculously receive from God, was first taken up by me in the fourth volume of Modern Painters; and the elementary principles of it, there stated, form the most valuable and least faultful part of the book. They had never been before expressed, or even thought of, for the simple reason that no professed geologists could draw a mountain, nor therefore see the essential points of its form. So that at this very time being, the large model of the Valley of Chamouni exhibited in the library of the British Museum, is a disgrace not only to the Museum first, and the Geological Society next, but actually it is a libel on the ordinary intelligence of human nature. For if people resolutely refuse to look at things in the right way, the law of their nature is, they come to look at them exactly in the wrong.