shoulders, with biforked summit; and at the same time possesses intense interest as the resting-place of Noah's ark. It rises from the plain of the Araxes, in Armenia, and lifts the higher of its two summits to the altitude of 17,210 feet above the level of the sea. The Peak of Teneriffe is a famous instance of the sky pinnacle, resting on tremendous escarpments, and looking down on the ocean from above the clouds. And the Peter Botte, in the Mauritius, though neither a regular nor very great specimen, is at least a very curious one, of the steeple mountain. A mural mass, fifteen hundred feet high, rises right up like a retaining wall from the plain; an esplanade about six feet broad, and sixty feet long, lies on the top; a cone of bare rock, so narrow as to look like a pinnacle, and upwards of three hundred feet high, goes right aloft from the end of the esplanade; and an enormous globular block rests on the apex of the cone, and overhangs it all round by several feet.

Great plateaus and great plains, were it for nothing but their vastness, are as truly wonders as great mountains. Most of Western Asia is little else than a tableland of from three to six thousand feet in height. All Central Asia, to the extent of 2400 miles in length, and 1500 miles in breadth, is a tableland of from five to fourteen thousand feet in height, flanked and traversed by immense mountain-chains, with the loftiest summits in the world. All Northern Asia, and most of Northern Europe, is an enormous plain, much of it a frozen waste, extending upwards of 6000 miles, all the way from the Pacific Ocean to the North Sea, through Siberia, European Russia, Germany, and the Netherlands. The south-west of

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