| Summary: | ""When Nature lifted the ice sheet from the mountains she may well be said not to have turned a new leaf, but to have made a new one of the old."" Muir writes that the chief factors of mountain degradation have been avalanches, landslips, and flowing water, and he discusses each in detail. In summation, he states that the average quantity of post-glacial denudation has been very small: three inches or so in the upper regions and not more than several feet in the lower levels. ""Rivers have only traced shallow wrinkles, avalanches have made scars, and winds and rains have blurred it, but the change, as a whole, is not greater than that which comes on a human countenance by a few years' exposure to common Alpine storms."" Illustrated with pen sketches.
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