THROUGH THE EYES OF THE GEOLOGIST

I





How habitually we go about over the surface of the earth, delving it
or cultivating it or leveling it, without thinking that it has not
always been as we now find it, that the mountains were not always
mountains, nor the valleys always valleys, nor the plains always
plains, nor the sand always sand, nor the clay always clay. Our
experience goes but a little way in such matters. Such a thought
takes us from human time to God's time, from the horizon of place
and years to the horizon of geologic ages. We go about our little
affairs in the world, sowing and reaping and building and
journeying, like children playing through the halls of their
ancestors, without pausing to ask how these things all came about.
We do not reflect upon the age of our fields any more than we do
upon the size of the globe under our feet: when we become curious
about such matters and look upon the mountains as either old or
young, or as the subjects of birth, growth, and decay, then we are
unconscious geologists. It is to our interest in such things that
geology appeals and it is this interest that it stimulates and
guides.

What an astonishing revelation, for instance, that the soil was born
of the rocks, and is still born of the rocks; that every particle of