gradually cooled down with age and experience, for growing old is
growing cold, as every one of us in time, alas, discovers. As it passed
from its fiery and volcanic youth to its staider and soberer middle age,
a solid crust began to form in filmy fashion upon its cooling surface.
The aqueous vapour that had floated at first as steam around its heated
mass condensed with time into a wide ocean over the now hardened shell.
Gradually this ocean shifted its bulk into two or three main bodies that
sank into hollows of the viscid crust, the precursors of Atlantic,
Pacific, and the Indian Seas. Wrinklings of the crust, produced by the
cooling and consequent contraction, gave rise at first to baby mountain
ranges, and afterwards to the earliest rough draughts of the still very
vague and sketchy continents. The world grew daily more complex and more
diverse; it progressed, in accordance with the Spencerian law, from the
homogeneous to the heterogeneous, and so forth, as aforesaid, with
delightful regularity.

At last, by long and graduated changes, seas and lands, peninsulas and
islands, lakes and rivers, hills and mountains, were wrought out by
internal or external energies on the crust thus generally fashioned.
Evaporation from the oceans gave rise to clouds and rain and hailstorms;
the water that fell upon the mountain tops cut out the valleys and river
basins; rills gathered into brooks, brooks into streams, streams into
primæval Niles, and Amazons, and Mississippis. Volcanic forces uplifted
here an Alpine chain, or depressed there a deep-sea hollow. Sediment
washed from the hills and plains, or formed from countless skeletons of
marine creatures, gathered on the sinking bed of the ocean as soft ooze,
or crumbling sand, or thick mud, or gravel and conglomerate. Now
upheaved into an elevated table-land, now slowly carved again by rain
and rill into valley and watershed, and now worn down once more into
the mere degraded stump of a plateau, the crust underwent innumerable