if they were blocked out but yesterday, and one sees vast naked
flood-plains, and painted deserts and bad lands and dry
lake-bottoms, that suggest a world yet in the making.

Some force has scalped the hills, ground the mountains, strangled
the rivers, channeled the plains, laid bare the succession of
geologic ages, stripping off formation after formation like a
garment, or cutting away the strata over hundreds of square miles,
as we pry a slab from a rock--and has done it all but yesterday. If
we break the slab in the prying, and thus secure only part of it,
leaving an abrupt jagged edge on the part that remains, we have
still a better likeness of the work of these great geologic
quarrymen. But other workmen, invisible to our eyes, have carved
these jagged edges into novel and beautiful forms.

The East is old, old! the West, with the exception of the Rocky
Mountains, is of yesterday in comparison. The Hudson was an ancient
river before the Mississippi was born, and the Catskills were being
slowly carved from a vast plateau while the rocks that were to form
many of the Western ranges were being laid down as sediment in the
bottom of the sea. California is yet in her teens, while New England
in comparison is an octogenarian. Just as much geology in the East
as in the West, did I say? Not as much visible geology, not as much
by many chapters of earth history, not as much by all the later
formations, by most of the Mesozoic and Tertiary deposits. The vast
series of sedimentary rocks since the Carboniferous age, to say
nothing of the volcanic, that make up these periods, are largely
wanting east of the Mississippi, except in New Jersey and in some of
the Gulf States. They are recent. They are like the history of our
own period compared with that of Egypt and Judea. It is mainly these