level or peneplain, and then reelevated and its hills and mountains
carved out anew.

We change the surface of the earth a little with our engineering,
drain a marsh, level a hill, sweep away a forest, or bore a
mountain, but what are these compared with the changes that have
gone on there before our race was heard of? In my native mountains,
the Catskills, all those peaceful pastoral valleys, with their farms
and homesteads, lie two or three thousand feet below the original
surface of the land. Could the land be restored again to its first
condition in Devonian times, probably the fields where I hoed corn
and potatoes as a boy would be buried one or two miles beneath the
rocks.

The Catskills are residual mountains, or what Agassiz calls
"denudation mountains." When we look at them with the eye of the
geologist we see the great plateau of tableland of Devonian times
out of which they were carved by the slow action of the sub-aerial
forces. They are like the little ridges and mounds of soil that
remain of your garden-patch after the waters of a cloudburst have
swept over it. They are immeasurably old, but they do not look it,
except to the eye of the geologist. There is nothing decrepit in
their appearance, nothing broken, or angular, or gaunt, or rawboned.
Their long, easy, flowing lines, their broad, smooth backs, their
deep, wide, gently sloping valleys, all help to give them a look of
repose and serenity, as if the fret and fever of life were long
since passed with them. Compared with the newer mountains of uplift
in the West, they are like cattle lying down and ruminating in the
field beside alert wild steers with rigid limbs and tossing horns.
They sleep and dream with bowed heads upon the landscape. Their