It is interesting to inquire how, after the popular feeling has thus been so entirely transformed, mountainous scenery now affects the imagination of cultivated people who visit it, whether impelled by the mere love of change or by that haunting passion which only the true lover of mountains can feel and appreciate. Even under the entirely changed conditions of modern travel and general education, we can detect the working of the same innate craving for some explanation of the more salient features of mountain-landscape that shall satisfy the imagination. The supernatural has long been discarded in such matters. Even the most unlearned traveller would demand that its place must be taken by scientific observation and inference. But the growth of a belief in the natural origin of all the features of the earth has grown faster than the capacity of science to guide it. Nowhere may the lasting influence of scenery on the imagination be more strikingly recognised than in the vague tentative efforts of the popular mind to apply what it supposes to be scientific method to the elucidation of these more impressive elements of topography. The crudest misconceptions have been started and implicitly accepted, which, though supposed to be based on observation of nature, are in reality hardly less unnatural than the legends of an older time. They have nevertheless gained a large measure of popular acceptance, because they meanwhile satisfy the demands of the imagination.
To the geologist whose duty it is to investigate these questions in the calm dry light of science, there is no task more irksome than to combat and dislodge these popular, preconceived opinions, and to procure an honest, intelligent survey of the actual evidence of fact upon which alone a solid judgment of the whole subject can be based. It is not that the evidence is difficult to collect or hard to understand. But so vividly does striking topography still appeal to the imagination, so inveterate has the habit become of linking each sublime result with the working of some stupendous cause, and of choosing in this way what is supposed to be the simplest and grandest solution of a problem, that men will hardly listen to any sober presentation of the facts. They refuse to believe that the interpretation of the earth's surface, like that of its planetary motion, is a physical question which cannot be guessed at or decided _a priori_, but must be answered by an appeal to the evidence furnished by Nature herself.