"Should it be no other than a sport of nature," he concludes, "the reputation which the stone bears in this country deserves that we should have given a description of it. If, on the other hand, what is on it be an inscription, though it certainly does not possess the beauty of the sculpture of Greece or Rome, it very possibly has the advantage of being the oldest in the universe. The country in which it is found is inhabited only by a race of men who live like beasts in the forests. We cannot imagine that they can have ever had any memorable event to transmit to posterity, nor, if ever they had had, that they could have invented the means. Nor can it be conceived that this country, with its present aspect, ever possessed more civilized inhabitants. The rigor of the climate and the barrenness of the land have destined it for the retreat of a few miserable wretches, who know no other. It seems, therefore, that the inscription must have been cut at a period when the country was situated in a different climate, and before some one of those great revolutions which, we cannot doubt, have taken place on our globe. The position that the earth's axis holds at present with respect to the ecliptic, occasions Lapland to receive the sun's rays very obliquely: it is therefore condemned to a long winter, adverse to man, as well as to all the productions of nature. No great movement, possibly, in the heavens was necessary, however, to cause all its misfortunes. These regions may formerly have been those on which the sun shone most favorably; the polar circles may have been what now the tropics are, and the torrid zone have filled the place occupied by the temperate." Pretty well, Monsieur, for a philosopher! The various attempts made to unriddle the real history of graphic granite are, however, scarce less curious than the speculations connected with what may be termed its romance. It seems to be generally held, since the days of old Hutton, who, in his "Theory of the Earth," discussed the subject with his usual ingenuity, that the feldspathic basis of the stone first crystallized, leaving interstices between the crystals, partaking of a certain regularity of form,--a consequence of the regularity of the crystals themselves,--and of a certain irregularity from the eccentric dispositions which these manifest in their position and relations to each other; and that these interstices, being afterwards filled up with quartz, form the characters of the rock,--characters partaking enough of the first element of _regularity_ to present their peculiar graphic appearance, and enough of the second element of _irregularity_ to exhibit forms of an alphabet-like variety of outline. The chemist, however, in cross-questioning the explanation, has his puzzle to propound regarding it. Quartz, he says, being considerably less fusible than feldspar, would naturally consolidate first, and so would give form to the more fusible substance, instead of deriving form from it. On what principle, then, is it that, reversing its ordinary character, it should have been the last of the two substances to consolidate in the graphic granite?--a query to which there seems to be no direct reply, but which as little affects the fact that it _was_ the substance which last consolidated, and which took form from the other, as the decision of the learned Strasburgers, which determined the impossibility of the long nose in Slawkenbergius's Tale, affected the actual existence of that remarkable feature. "It happens _to be_, notwithstanding your objection," said the controversialists on the pro-nose side of the question. "But it _ought not_," replied their opponents.