4. Lines of Rest. Those which are assumed by débris when in a state of comparative permanence and stability.
1. Lines of Fall.
However little the reader may be acquainted with hills, I believe 1. Lines of Fall. Produced by falling bodies upon hill-surfaces. that, almost instinctively, he will perceive that the form supposed to belong to a wooded promontory at a, [Fig. 100], is an impossible one; and that the form at b is not only a possible but probable one. The lines are equally formal in both. But in a, the curve is a portion of a circle, meeting a level line: in b it is an infinite line, getting less and less steep as it ascends.
| Fig. 100. |
Whenever a mass of mountain is worn gradually away by forces descending from its top, it necessarily assumes, more or less perfectly, according to the time for which it has been exposed, and the tenderness of its substance, such contours as those at b, for the simple reason that every stream and every falling grain of sand gains in velocity and erosive power as it descends. Hence, cutting away the ground gradually faster and faster, they produce the most rapid curvature (provided the rock be hard enough) towards the bottom of the hill.[90]
§ 22. But farther: in b it will be noticed that the lines always get steeper as they fall more and more to the right; and I should think the reader must feel that they look more natural, so drawn, than, as at a, in unvarying curves.
| Fig. 101. |
This is no less easily accounted for. The simplest typical form under which a hill can occur is that of a cone. Let A C B, [Fig. 101], have been its original contour. Then the aqueous forces will cut away the shaded portions, reducing it to the outline d C e. Farther, in doing so, the water will certainly have formed for itself gullies or channels from top to bottom. These, supposing them at equal distances round the cone, will appear, in perspective, in the lines g h i. It does not, of course, matter whether we consider the lines in this figure to represent the bottom of the ravines, or the ridges between, both being formed on similar curves; but the rounded lines in [Fig. 100] would be those of forests seen on the edges of each detached ridge.
§ 23. Now although a mountain is rarely perfectly conical, and never divided by ravines at exactly equal distances, the law which is seen in entire simplicity in [Fig. 101], applies with a sway more or less interrupted, but always manifest, to every convex and retiring mountain form. All banks that thus turn away from the spectator necessarily are thrown into perspectives like that of one side of this figure; and although not divided with equality, their irregular divisions crowd gradually together towards the distant edge, being then less steep, and separate themselves towards the body of the hill, being then more steep.