lot of man has fallen.

But by degrees thoughtful students of geology have been led to perceive
that the earliest efforts of nature have been by no means the
grandest. Alps and Andes are children of yesterday when compared with
Snowdon and the Cumberland hills; and the so-called glacial epoch--that
in which perhaps the most extensive physical changes of which any
record remaining occurred--is the last and the newest of the
revolutions of the globe. And in proportion as physical
geography--which is the geology of our own epoch--has grown into a
science, and the present order of nature has been ransacked to find
what, 'hibernice', we may call precedents for the phenomena of the
past, so the apparent necessity of supposing the past to be widely
different from the present has diminished.

The transporting power of the greatest deluge which can be imagined
sinks into insignificance beside that of the slowly floating, slowly
melting iceberg, or the glacier creeping along at its snail's pace of a
yard a day. The study of the deltas of the Nile, the Ganges, and the
Mississippi has taught us how slow is the wearing action of water, how
vast its effects when time is allowed for its operation. The reefs of
the Pacific, the deep-sea soundings of the Atlantic, show that it is to
the slow-growing coral and to the imperceptible animalcule, which lives
its brief space and then adds its tiny shell to the muddy cairn left by
its brethren and ancestors, that we must look as the agents in the
formation of limestone and chalk, and not to hypothetical oceans
saturated with calcareous salts and suddenly depositing them.

And while the inquirer has thus learnt that existing forces--'give them
time'--are competent to produce all the physical phenomena we meet with