it was once locked up in the primitive granite and was unlocked by
the slow action of the rain and the dews and the snows; that the
rocky ribs of the earth were clothed with this fertile soil out of
which we came and to which we return by their own decay; that the
pulling-down of the inorganic meant the building-up of the organic;
that the death of the crystal meant the birth of the cell, and
indirectly of you and me and of all that lives upon the earth.

Had there been no soil, had the rocks not decayed, there had been no
you and me. Such considerations have long made me feel a keen
interest in geology, and especially of late years have stimulated my
desire to try to see the earth as the geologist sees it. I have
always had a good opinion of the ground underfoot, out of which we
all come, and to which we all return; and the story the geologists
tell us about it is calculated to enhance greatly that good opinion.

I think that if I could be persuaded, as my fathers were, that the
world was made in six days, by the fiat of a supernatural power, I
should soon lose my interest in it. Such an account of it takes it
out of the realm of human interest, because it takes it out of the
realm of natural causation, and places it in the realm of the
arbitrary, and non-natural. But to know that it was not made at all,
in the mechanical sense, but that it grew--that it is an evolution
as much as the life upon the surface, that it has an almost infinite
past, that it has been developing and ripening for millions upon
millions of years, a veritable apple upon the great sidereal tree,
ameliorating from cycle to cycle, mellowing, coloring,
sweetening--why, such a revelation adds immensely to our interest in
it.