each generation! If our millionaires had to earn their wealth cent
by cent, and carry each cent home with them at night, it would be
some years before they became millionaires. This is but a faint
symbol of the slow process by which nature has piled up her riches.
She has had no visions of sudden wealth. To clothe the earth with
soil made from the disintegrated mountains--can we figure that time
to ourselves? The Orientals try to get a hint of eternity by saying
that when the Himalayas have been ground to powder by allowing a
gauze veil to float against them once in a thousand years, eternity
will only have just begun. Our mountains have been pulverized by a
process almost as slow. In our case the gauze veil is the air, and
the rains, and the snows, before which even granite crumbles. See
what the god of erosion, in the shape of water, has done in the
river valleys and gorges--cut a mile deep in the Colorado canyon,
and yet this canyon is but of yesterday in geologic time. Only give
the evolutionary god time enough and all these miracles are surely
wrought.

Truly it is hard for us to realize what a part time has played in
the earth's history,--just time, duration,--so slowly, oh, so
slowly, have the great changes been brought about! The turning of
mud and silt into rock in the bottom of the old seas seems to have
been merely a question of time. Mud does not become rock in man's
time, nor vegetable matter become coal. These processes are too slow
for us. The flexing and folding of the rocky strata, miles deep,
under an even pressure, is only a question of time. Allow time
enough and force enough, and a layer of granite may be bent like a
bow. The crystals of the rock seem to adjust themselves to the
strain, and to take up new positions, just as they do, much more
rapidly, in a cake of ice under pressure. Probably no human agency