TIME AND CHANGE

BY

JOHN BURROUGHS

BOSTON AND NEW YORK

1912

PREFACE

I suspect that in this volume my reader will feel that I have givenhim a stone when he asked for bread, and his feeling in this respectwill need no apology. I fear there is more of the matter of hardscience and of scientific speculation in this collection than ofspiritual and aesthetic nutriment; but I do hope the volume is notentirely destitute of the latter. If I have not in some degreesucceeded in transmuting my rocks into a kind of wholesome literarybread, or, to vary the figure, in turning them into a soil in whichsome green thing or flower of human interest and emotion may takeroot and grow, then, indeed, have I come short of the end I had inview. 

I am well aware that my own interest in geology far outruns myknowledge, but if I can in some degree kindle that interest in myreader, I shall be putting him on the road to a fuller knowledgethan I possess. As with other phases of nature, I have probablyloved the rocks more than I have studied them. In my youth Idelighted in lingering about and beneath the ledges of my nativehills, partly in the spirit of adventure and a boy's love of thewild, and partly with an eye to their curious forms, and theevidences of immense time that looked out from their gray andcrumbling fronts. I was in the presence of Geologic Time, and wasimpressed by the scarred and lichen-coated veteran without knowingwho or what he was. But he put a spell upon me that has deepened asthe years have passed, and now my boyhood ledges are moreinteresting to me than ever. 

If one gains an interest in the history of the earth, he is quitesure to gain an interest in the history of the life on the earth. Ifthe former illustrates the theory of development, so must thelatter. The geologist is pretty sure to be an evolutionist. Asscience turns over the leaves of the great rocky volume, it sees theimprint of animals and plants upon them and it traces their changesand the appearance of new species from age to age. The biologic treehas grown and developed as the geologic soil in which it is rootedhas deepened and ripened. I am sure I was an evolutionist in theabstract, or by the quality and complexion of my mind, before I readDarwin, but to become an evolutionist in the concrete, and acceptthe doctrine of the animal origin of man, has not for me been aneasy matter. 

The essays on the subject in this volume are the outcome of thestages of brooding and thinking which I have gone through inaccepting this doctrine. I am aware that there is much repetition inthem, but maybe on that very account they will help my reader to goalong with me over the long road we have to travel to reach thisconclusion. 

July, 1912. 

CONTENTS

I. THE LONG ROAD

II. THE DIVINE ABYSS

III. THE SPELL OF THE YOSEMITE

IV. THROUGH THE EYES OF THE GEOLOGIST

V. HOLIDAYS IN HAWAII

VI. THE OLD ICE FLOOD

VII. THE FRIENDLY SOIL

VIII. PRIMAL ENERGIES

IX. SCIENTIFIC FAITH

X. "THE WORM STRIVING TO BE MAN"

XI. THE PHANTOMS BEHIND US

XII. THE HAZARDS OF THE PAST

XIII. THE GOSPEL OF NATURE

TIME AND CHANGE

I

THE LONG ROAD

I

The long road I have in mind is the long road of evolution, --theroad you and I have traveled in the guise of humbler organisms, fromthe first unicellular life in the old Cambrian seas to the complexand highly specialized creature that rules supreme in the animalkingdom to-day. Surely a long journey, stretching throughimmeasurable epochs of geologic time, and attended by vicissitudesof which we can form but feeble conceptions. 

The majority of readers, I fancy, are not yet ready to admit thatthey, or any of their forebears, have ever made such a journey. Wehave all long been taught that our race was started upon its careeronly a few thousand years ago, started, not amid the warrings ofsavage elemental nature, but in a pleasant garden with everythingneeded close at hand. This belief has faded a good deal in our time, especially among thoughtful persons; but in a modified form, as thespecial creation theory, it held sway in the minds of the oldernaturalists like Agassiz and Dawson, long after Darwin had launchedhis revolutionary doctrine of our animal origin, putting man in thesame zoological scheme as the lower orders. 

We are slow to adjust our minds to the revelations of science, theyhave been so long adjusted to a revelation, so-called, of anentirely different character. It gives them a wrench more or lessviolent when we try to make them at home and at their ease amidthese new and startling disclosures. To many good people evolutionseems an ungodly doctrine, like setting up a remorseless logic inthe place of an omnipresent Creator. But there is no help for it. Science has fairly turned us out of our comfortable littleanthropomorphic notion of things into the great out-of-doors of theuniverse. We must and will get used to the chill, yea, to the cosmicchill, if need be. Our religious instincts will be all the hardierfor it. 

When we accepted Newton's discovery of the force called gravitation, we virtually surrendered ourselves to the enemy, and started upon aroad, the road of natural causation, that traverses the whole systemof created things. We cannot turn back; we may lie down by theroadside and dream our old dreams, but our children and theirchildren will press on, and will be exhilarated by the journey. 

It is at first sight an unpalatable truth that evolution confrontsus with, and it requires courage calmly to face it. But it is inperfect keeping with the whole career of physical science, which isforever directing our attention to common near-at-hand facts for thekey to remote and mysterious occurrences. 

It seems to me that evolution adds greatly to the wonder of life, because it takes it out of the realm of the arbitrary, theexceptional, and links it to the sequence of natural causation. Thatman should have been brought into existence by the fiat of anomnipotent power is less an occasion for wonder than that he shouldhave worked his way up from the lower non-human forms. That themanward impulse should never have been lost in all the appallingvicissitudes of geologic time, that it should have pushed steadilyon, through mollusk and fish and amphibian and reptile, throughswimming and creeping and climbing things, and that the forms thatconveyed it should have escaped the devouring monsters of the earth, sea, and air till it came to its full estate in a human being, isthe wonder of wonders. 

In like manner, evolution raises immensely the value of thebiological processes that are everywhere operative about us, byshowing us that these processes are the channels through which thecreative energy has worked, and is still working. Not in the far-offor in the exceptional does it seek the key to man's origin, but inthe sleepless activity of the creative force, which has been pushingonward and upward, from the remotest time, till it has come to fullfruition in man. 

It is easy to inject into man's natural history a supernaturalelement, as nearly all biologists and anthropologists beforeDarwin's time did, and as many serious people still do. It is tooeasy, in fact, and the temptation to do so is great. It makes shortwork of the problem of man's origin, and saves a deal of trouble. But this method is more and more discredited, and the youngerbiologists and natural philosophers accept the zoologicalconception of man, which links him with all the lower forms, andproceed to work from that. 

When we have taken the first step in trying to solve the problem ofman's origin, where can we stop? Can we find any point in hishistory where we can say, Here his natural history ends, and hissupernatural history begins? Does his natural history end with thepre-glacial man, with the cave man, or the river-drift man, with thelow-browed, long-jawed fossil man of Java, --Pithecanthropus erectus, described by Du Bois? Where shall we stop on his trail? I had almostsaid "step on his tail, " for we undoubtedly, if we go back farenough, come to a time when man had a tail. Every unborn child at acertain stage of its development still has a tail, as it also has acoat of hair and a hand-like foot. But could we stop with the tailedman--the manlike ape, or the apelike man? Did his Creator start himwith this appendage, or was it a later suffix of his own invention?

If we once seriously undertake to solve the riddle of man's origin, and go back along the line of his descent, I doubt if we can findthe point, or the form, where the natural is supplanted by thesupernatural as it is called, where causation ends and miraclebegins. Even the first dawn of protozoic life in the primordial seasmust have been natural, or it would not have occurred, --must havebeen potential in what went before it. In this universe, so far aswe know it, one thing springs from another; the sequence of causeand effect is continuous and inviolable. 

We know that no man is born of full stature, with his hat and bootson; we know that he grows from an infant, and we know the infantgrows from a fetus, and that the fetus grows from a bit of nucleatedprotoplasm in the mother's womb. Why may not the race of man growfrom a like simple beginning? It seems to be the order of nature; itIS the order of nature, --first the germ, the inception, then theslow growth from the simple to the complex. It is the order of ourown thoughts, our own arts, our own civilization, our own language. 

In our candid moments we acknowledge the animal in ourselves and inour neighbors, --especially in our neighbors, --the beast, the shark, the hog, the sloth, the fox, the monkey; but to accept the notion ofour animal origin, that gives us pause. To believe that our remoteancestor, no matter how remote in time or space, was a lowlyorganized creature living in the primordial seas with no more brainsthan a shovel-nosed shark or a gar-pike, puts our scientific faithto severe test. 

Think of it. For countless ages, millions upon millions of years, wesee the earth swarming with life, low bestial life, devouring anddevoured, myriads of forms, all in bondage to nature or naturalforces, living only to eat and to breed, localized, dependent uponplace and clime, shaped to specific ends like machines, --to fly, toswim, to climb, to run, to dig, to drill, to weave, to wade, tograze, to crush, --knowing not what they do, as void of consciouspurpose as the thorns, the stings, the hooks, the coils, and thewings in the vegetable world, making no impression upon the face ofnature, as much a part of it as the trees and the stones, speciesafter species having its day, and then passing off the stage, whensuddenly, in the day before yesterday in the geologic year, sosuddenly as to give some color of truth to the special creationtheory, a new and strange animal appears, with new and strangepowers, separated from the others by what appears an impassablegulf, less specialized in his bodily powers than the others, butvastly more specialized in his brain and mental powers, institutinga new order of things upon the earth, the face of which he in timechanges through his new gift of reason, inventing tools and weaponsand language, harnessing the physical forces to his own ends, andputting all things under his feet, --man the wonder-worker, thebeholder of the stars, the critic and spectator of creation itself, the thinker of the thoughts of God, the worshiper, the devotee, thehero, spreading rapidly over the earth, and developing withprodigious strides when once fairly launched upon his career. Can itbe possible, we ask, that this god was fathered by the low bestialorders below him, --instinct giving birth to reason, animal ferocitydeveloping into human benevolence, the slums of nature sending forththe ruler of the earth. It is a hard proposition, I say, undoubtedlythe hardest that science has ever confronted us with. 

Haeckel, discussing this subject, suggests that it is the parvenu inus that is reluctant to own our lowly progenitors, the pride offamily and position, like that of would-be aristocratic sons whoconceal the humble origin of their parents. But it is more thanthat; it is the old difficulty of walking by faith where there isnothing visible to walk upon: we lack faith in the efficiency of thebiologic laws, or any mundane forces, to bridge the tremendous chasmthat separates man from even the highest of the lower orders. Hisradical unlikeness to all the forms below him, as if he moved in aworld apart, into which they could never enter, as in a sense hedoes, is where the difficulty lies. Moreover, evolution balks usbecause of the inconceivable stretch of time during which it hasbeen at work. It is as impossible for us to grasp geological time assidereal space. All the standards of measurement furnished us byexperience are as inadequate as is a child's cup to measure theocean. 

Several million years, or one million years, --how can we take it in?We cannot. A hundred years is a long time in human history, and howwe pause before a thousand! Then think of ten thousand, of fiftythousand, of one hundred thousand, of ten hundred thousand, or onemillion, or of one hundred million! What might not the slow butceaseless creative energy do in that time, changing but a hair ineach generation! If our millionaires had to earn their wealth centby cent, and carry each cent home with them at night, it would besome years before they became millionaires. This is but a faintsymbol of the slow process by which nature has piled up her riches. She has had no visions of sudden wealth. To clothe the earth withsoil made from the disintegrated mountains--can we figure that timeto ourselves? The Orientals try to get a hint of eternity by sayingthat when the Himalayas have been ground to powder by allowing agauze veil to float against them once in a thousand years, eternitywill only have just begun. Our mountains have been pulverized by aprocess almost as slow. In our case the gauze veil is the air, andthe rains, and the snows, before which even granite crumbles. Seewhat the god of erosion, in the shape of water, has done in theriver valleys and gorges--cut a mile deep in the Colorado canyon, and yet this canyon is but of yesterday in geologic time. Only givethe evolutionary god time enough and all these miracles are surelywrought. 

Truly it is hard for us to realize what a part time has played inthe earth's history, --just time, duration, --so slowly, oh, soslowly, have the great changes been brought about! The turning ofmud and silt into rock in the bottom of the old seas seems to havebeen merely a question of time. Mud does not become rock in man'stime, nor vegetable matter become coal. These processes are too slowfor us. The flexing and folding of the rocky strata, miles deep, under an even pressure, is only a question of time. Allow timeenough and force enough, and a layer of granite may be bent like abow. The crystals of the rock seem to adjust themselves to thestrain, and to take up new positions, just as they do, much morerapidly, in a cake of ice under pressure. Probably no human agencycould flex a stratum of rock, because there is not time enough, evenif there were power enough. "A low temperature acting gradually, "says my geology, "during an indefinite age would produce resultsthat could not be otherwise brought about even through greaterheat. " "Give us time, " say the great mechanical forces, "and we willshow you the immobile rocks and your rigid mountain chains asflexible as a piece of leather. " "Give us time, " say the dews andthe rains and the snowflakes, "and we will make you a garden out ofthose same stubborn rocks and frowning ledges. " "Give us time, " saysLife, starting with her protozoans in the old Cambrian seas, "and Iwill not stop till I have peopled the earth with myriad forms andcrowned them all with man. "

Dana thinks that had "a man been living during the changes thatproduced the coal, he would not have suspected their progress, " soslow and quiet were they. It is probable that parts of our ownsea-coast are sinking and other parts rising as rapidly as theoscillation of the land and sea went on that resulted in the layingdown of the coal measures. 

An eternity to man is but a day in the cosmic process. In the faceof geologic time, man's appearance upon the earth as man, with awritten history, is something that has just happened; it was in thismorning's paper, we read of it at breakfast. As evolution goes, itwill not be old news yet for a hundred thousand years or so, and bythat time, what will he have done, if he goes on at his present rateof accelerated speed? Probably he will not have caught the gods ofevolution at their work, or witnessed the origin of species bynatural descent, these things are too slow for him; but he willcertainly have found out many things that we are all eager to know. 

In nature as a whole we see results and not processes. We see therock strata bent and folded, we see the whole mountain-chains flexedand shortened by the flexure; but had we been present, we should nothave suspected what was going on. Our little span of life does notgive us the parallax necessary. The rock strata, miles thick, may bebeing flexed now under our feet, and we know it not. The earth isshrinking, but so slowly! When, under the slow strain, the stratasuddenly give way or sink, and an earthquake results, then we knowsomething has happened. 

A recent biologist and physicist thinks, and doubtless thinkswisely, that the reason why we have never been able to produceliving from non-living matter in our laboratories, is that we cannottake time enough. Even if we could bring about the conditions of theearly geologic ages in which life had its dawn, which of course wecannot, we could not produce life because we have not geologic timeat our disposal. 

The reaction which we call life was probably as much a cosmic orgeologic event as were the reactions which produced the differentelements and compounds, and demanded the same slow gestation in thewomb of time. During what cycles upon cycles the great mother-forcesof the universe must have brooded over the inorganic before theorganic was brought forth! The archean age, during which thebrooding seems to have gone on, was probably as long as all the agessince. 

How we are baffled when we talk about the beginning of anything innature or in our own lives! In our experience there must be a first, but when did manhood begin; when did puberty, when did old age, begin? When did each stage of our mental growth begin? When or wheredid the English language begin, or the French, or the German? Wasthere a first English word spoken? From the first animal sound, ifwe can conceive of such, up to the human speech of to-day, there isan infinite gradation of sounds and words. 

Was there a first summer, a first winter, a first spring? Therecould hardly have been a first day even for ages and ages, but onlyslowly approximating day. After an immense lapse of time the airmust have cleared and the day become separated from the night, andthe seasons must have become gradually defined. Things slowly emergeone after another from a dim, nebulous condition, both in our owngrowth and experience and in the development of the physicaluniverse. 

In nature there is no first and last. There is an endless beginningand an endless ending. There was no first man or first woman, nofirst bird, or fish, or reptile. Back of each one stretches anendless chain of approximating men and birds and reptiles. 

This talk about the time and place where man began his existenceseems to me misleading, because it appears to convey the idea thathe began as man at some time, in some place. Whereas he grew. Hebegan where and when the first cell appeared, and he has been on theroad ever since. There is no point in the line where he emerged fromthe not-man and became man. He was emerging from the not-man formillions of years, and when you put your finger on an animal formand say, This is man, you must go back through whole geologicperiods before you reach the not-man. If Darwin is right, there isno more reason for believing that the different species or forms ofanimal life were suddenly introduced than there is for believingthat the soil, or the minerals, gold, silver, diamonds, or vegetablemold and verdure were suddenly introduced. 

II

If we know anything of the earth's past history, we know that thecontinents were long in forming, that they passed through manyvicissitudes of heat and cold, of fire and flood, of upheaval andsubsidence--that they had, so to speak, their first low, simplerudimentary or invertebrate life, that they were all slow in gettingtheir backbones, slower still in clothing their rock ribs with soiland verdure, that they passed through a sort of amphibian stage, nowunder water, now on dry land, that their many kinds of soils andclimes were not differentiated and their complex water-systemsestablished till well into Tertiary times--in short, that they havepassed more and more from the simple to the complex, from thedisorganized to the organized. When man comes to draw his sustenancefrom their breasts, may they not be said to have reached themammalian stage?

The fertile plain and valley and the rounded hill are of slowgrowth, immensely slow. But any given stage of the earth hasfollowed naturally from the previous stage, only more and more andhigher and higher forces took a hand in the game. First its elementspassed through the stage of fire, then through the stage of water, then merged into the stage of air. More and more the aerialelements--oxygen, carbon, nitrogen--have entered into itsconstituents and fattened the soil. The humanizing of the earth hasbeen largely a process of oxidation. More than disintegrated rockmakes up the soil; the air and the rains and the snows have allcontributed a share. 

The history of the soil which we turn with our spade, and stamp withour shoes, covers millions upon millions of years. It is the ashesof the mountains, the leavings of untold generations of animal andvegetable life. It came out of the sea, it drifted from the heavens;it flowed out from the fiery heart of the globe; it has been workedover and over by frost and flood, blown by winds, shoveled by ice, --mixed and kneaded and moulded as the house-wife kneads and mouldsher bread, --refining and refining from age to age. Much of it washeld in solution in the primordial seas, whence it was filtered andused and precipitated by countless forms of marine life, making asediment that in time became rocks, that again in time becamecontinents or parts of them, which the aerial forces reduced tosoil. Indeed, the soil itself is an evolution, as much so as thelife upon it. 

We probably have little conception of how intimate and cooperativeall parts of the universe are with one another, --of the debt we oweto the farthest stars, and to the remotest period of time. We mustowe a debt to the monsters of Mesozoic and Caenozoic time; theyhelped to fertilize the soil for us, and to discipline the ruderforces of life. We owe a debt to all that has gone before: to theheavens above and to the earth-fires beneath, to the ice-sheets thatground down the mountains, and to the ocean currents. Just as we owea debt to the men and women in our line of descent, so we owe a debtto the ruder primordial forces that shaped the planet to our use, and took a hand in the game of animal life. 

The gods of evolution had served a long apprenticeship; they hadgained proficiency and were master workmen. Or shall we say that theelements of life had become more plastic and adaptable, or that thelife fund had accumulated, so to speak? Had the vast succession ofliving beings, the long experience in organization, at last made theproblem of the origin of man easier to solve?

One fancies every living thing as not only returning its mineralelements to the soil, but as in some subtle way leaving its vitalforces also, and thus contributing to the impalpable, invisiblestore-house of vital energy of the globe. 

At first among the mammalian tribes there was much muscle and littlebrains. But in the middle Tertiary the mammal brain began suddenlyto enlarge, so that in our time the brain of the horse is more thaneight times the size of the brain of his progenitor, the dinocerasof Eocene times. 

Nature seems to have experimented with brains and nerve ganglia, asshe has with so many other things. The huge reptilian creatures ofMesozoic time--the various dinosaurs--had ridiculously small headsand brains, but they had what might be called supplementary brainswell toward the other end of the body, --great nervous masses nearthe sacrum, many times the size of the ostensible brain, which nodoubt performed certain brain functions. But the principle ofcentralization was at work, and when in later time we reach thehigher mammalian forms, we find these outlying nervous masses calledin, so to speak, and concentrated in the head. 

Nature has tried the big, the gigantic, over and over, and thenabandoned it. In Carboniferous times there was a giganticdragon-fly, measuring more than two feet in the expanse of wings. Still earlier, there were gigantic mollusks and sea scorpions, acephalopod larger than a man; then gigantic fishes and amphibiansand reptiles, followed by enormous mammals. But the geologic recordshows that these huge forms did not continue. The mollusks that lastunchanged through millions of years are the clam and the oyster ofour day. The huge mosses and tree-ferns are gone, and only theirhumbler types remain. Among men giants are short-lived. 

On the other hand, the steady increase in size of certain otherspecies of animals during the later geologic ages is a curious andinteresting fact. The first progenitors of the elephant that havebeen found show a small animal that steadily grew through the agestill the animal as we now find it is reached. Among theinvertebrates this same progressive increase in size has been noted, a small shell in the Devonian becoming enormous in the Triassic. Certain species of sharks of medium size in the lower Eocenecontinue to increase till they attain the astounding dimensions inthe Miocene and Pliocene of over one hundred feet long. A certainfish appearing in the Devonian as a small fish of seven centimetresin length, becomes in the Carboniferous era a creature twenty-sevencentimetres in length. Among the mammals of Tertiary times this samelaw of steady increase in size has been operative, as seen in theFelidae, the stag, and the antelope. Man himself has, no doubt, beenunder the same law, and is probably a much larger animal than any ofhis Tertiary ancestors. In the vegetable world this process, in manycases, at least, has been reversed, and the huge treelikeclub-mosses and horsetails of Carboniferous times have dwindled inour time to very insignificant herbaceous forms. 

Animals of overweening size are handicapped in many ways, so thatnature in most cases finally abandons the gigantic and sticks to themedium and the small. 

III

Can we fail to see the significance of the order in which life hasappeared upon the globe--the ascending series from the simple to themore and more complex? Can we doubt that each series is the outcomeof the one below it--that there is a logical sequence from theprotozoa up through the invertebrates, the vertebrates, to man? Isit not like all that we know of the method of nature? Could wesubstitute the life of one period for that of another without doingobvious violence to the logic of nature? Is there no fundamentalreason for the gradation we behold?

All animal life lowest in organization is earliest in time, and viceversa, the different classes of a sub-kingdom, and the differentorders of a class, succeeding one another, as Cope says, in therelative order of their zoological rank. Thus the sponges are laterthan the protozoa, the corals succeed the sponges, the sea-urchinscome after the corals, the shell-fish follow the sea-urchins, thearticulates are later than the shell-fish, the vertebrates are laterthan the articulates. Among the former, the amphibian follows thefish, the reptile follows the amphibian, the mammal follows thereptile, and non-placental mammals are followed by the placental. 

It almost seems as if nature hesitated whether to produce the mammalfrom the reptile or from the amphibian, as the mammal bears marks ofboth in its anatomy, and which was the parent stem is still aquestion. 

The heart started as a simple tube in the Leptocardii; it dividesitself into two cavities in the fishes, into three in the reptiles, and into four in the birds and mammals. So the ossification of thevertebral column takes place progressively, from the Silurian to themiddle Jurassic. 

The same ascending series of creation as a whole is repeated in theinception and development of every one of the higher animals to-day. Each one begins as a single cell, which soon becomes a congeries ofcells, which is followed by congeries of congeries of cells, tillthe highly complex structure of the grown animal with all itsintricate physiological activities and specialization of parts, isreached. It is typical of the course of the creative energy from thefirst unicellular life up to man, each succeeding stage flowing outof, and necessitated by, the preceding stage. 

How slowly and surely the circulatory system improved! From thecold-blooded animal to the warm-blooded is a great advance. In thewarm-blooded is developed the capacity to maintain a fixedtemperature while that of the surrounding medium changes. The brainand nervous system display the same progressive ascent from thebrainless acrania, up through the fishes, batrachia, reptiles, andbirds to the top in mammals. The same with the skeletons in theinvertebrates, from membrane to cartilage, from cartilage to bone, so that the primitive cartilage remaining in any part of theskeleton is considered a mark of inferiority. 

According to Cope, there has been progressive improvement in themechanism of the body--it has become a better and better machine. The suspension of the lower jaw, so as to bring the teeth nearer thepower, --the masseter and related muscles, --was a slow evolution anda great advance. The fin is more primitive than the limb; the limbsthemselves display a constantly increasing differentiation of partsfrom the batrachian to the mammalian. There was no good ankle jointin early Eocene times. The model ankle joint is a tongue and groovearrangement, and this is a later evolution. In Eocene times theywere nearly all flat. The arched foot, too, comes in; this is anadvance on the flat foot. The bones of the palms and soles are notlocked until the later Tertiary. The vertebral column progressed inthe same way, from flat to the double curve and the interlockingprocess, thus securing greatest strength with greatest mobility. Inthe earliest life locomotion was diffused, later it becameconcentrated. The worm walks with its whole body. 

IV

If we figure to ourselves the geologic history of the earth underthe symbol of a year of three hundred and sixty-five days, each daya million years, which is probably not far out of the way, then man, the biped, the Homo sapiens, in relation to this immense past, is ofto-day, or of this very morning; while the origin of the firstvertebrates, the fishes, from which he has arisen, falls nearer themiddle of the great year. Or, dividing this geologic year into fourdivisions or seasons, primary, secondary, tertiary, and quaternary, the fishes fall in the primary, the reptiles in the secondary, themammals in the tertiary, and man in the early quaternary. 

If the fluid earth hardened, and the seas were formed in the firstmonth of this year, then probably the first beginning of lifeappeared in the second month, the invertebrate in the third orfourth, --March or April, --the vertebrates in May or June, theamphibians in July or August, the reptiles in August or September, the mammals in October or November, and man in December, --separatedfrom the first beginnings of life by all those millions uponmillions of years. 

If life is a ferment, as we are told it is, how long it took thisyeast to leaven the whole loaf! Man is evidently the end of theseries, he is the top of the biological tree. His specializationupon physical lines seems to have ended far back in geologic time;his future specialization and development is evidently to be uponmental and spiritual lines. Nature, as I have said, began to tendmore and more to brains in the early Tertiary, --the autumn of thegreat year; her best harvest began to mature then, her grain beganto ripen. Indeed, this increased cephalization of animal life in thefall of the great year does suggest a kind of ripening process, theturning of the sap and milk, which had been so abundant and soriotous in the earlier period, into fibre and fruit and seed. 

May it not be that that long and sultry spring and summer of theearth's early history, a time probably longer than has sinceelapsed, played a part in the development of life analogous to thatplayed by our spring and summer, making it opulent, varied, gigantic, and making possible the condensation and refinement thatcame with man in the recent period?

The earth is a pretty big apple, and the solar tree upon which ithangs is a pretty big tree, but why may it not have gone through akind of ripening process for all that? its elements becoming lesscrude and acrid, and better suited to sustain the higher forms, asthe eons passed?

At any rate, the results seem to justify such a fancy. The earth hasslowly undergone a change that may fairly be called a ripeningprocess; its soil has deepened and mellowed, its harsher featureshave softened, more and more color has come to its surface, theflowers have bloomed, the more succulent fruits have developed, theair has cleared, and love and benevolence and altruism have beenborn in the world. 

V

Life had to creep or swim long before it could walk, and it walkedlong before it could fly; it had feeling long before it had eyes, and it no doubt had eyes long before it could hear or smell. It wascapable of motion long before it had limbs; it assimilated food longbefore it had a mouth or a stomach. It had a digestive tract longbefore it had a spinal cord; it had nerve ganglia long before it hada well-defined brain. It had sensation long before it hadperception; it was unisexual long before it was bisexual; it had ashell long before it had a skeleton; it had instinct and reflexaction long before it had self-consciousness and reason. Always fromthe lower to the higher, from the simple to the more complex, andalways slowly, gently. 

Life has had its foetal stage, its stage of infancy, and childhood, and maturity, and will doubtless have its old age. It took itmillions upon millions of years to get out of the sea upon dry land;and it took it more millions upon dry land, or since theCarboniferous age, when the air probably first began to bebreathable, --all the vast stretch of the Secondary and Tertiaryages, --to get upright and develop a reasoning brain, and reach theestate of man. Step by step, in orderly succession, does creationmove. In the rising and in the setting of the sun one may see hownature's great processes steal upon us, silently and unnoticed, yetalways in sequence, stage succeeding stage, one thing following fromanother, the spectacular moment of sunset following inevitably fromthe quiet, unnoticed sinking of the sun in the west, or thestartling flash of his rim above the eastern horizon only thefulfillment of the promise of the dawn. All is development andsuccession, and man is but the sunrise of the dawn of life inCambrian or Silurian times, and is linked to that time as one hourof the day is linked to another. 

The more complex life became, the more rapidly it seems to havedeveloped, till it finally makes rapid strides to reach man. Oneseems to see Life, like a traveler on the road, going faster andfaster as it nears its goal. Those long ages of unicellular life inthe old seas, how immense they appear to have been; then how the ageof invertebrates dragged on, millions upon millions of years; thenthe age of fishes; the Palaeozoic age, how vast--put by Haeckel atthirty-four millions of years, adding rock strata forty-one thousandfeet thick; then the Mesozoic or third period, the age of reptiles, eleven million years, with strata twelve thousand feet thick. Thencame the Caenozoic age, or age of mammals, three million years, withstrata thirty-one hundred feet thick. The god of life was getting ina hurry now; man was not far off. A new device, the placenta, washit upon in this age, and probably the diaphragm and the brain ofanimals, all greatly enlarged. Finally comes the Anthropozoic orQuaternary age, the age of man, three hundred thousand years, withnot much addition to the sedimentary rocks. 

Man seems to be the net result of it all, of all these vast cyclesof Palaeozoic, Mesozoic, and Caenozoic life. He is the one dropfinally distilled from the vast weltering sea of lower organicforms. It looks as if it all had to be before he could be--all thedelay and waste and struggle and pain--all that long carnival of sealife, all that saturnalia of gigantic forms upon the land and in theair, all that rising and sinking of the continents, and all thatshoveling to and fro and mixing of the soils, before the world wasready for him. 

In the early Tertiary, millions of years ago, the earth seems tohave been ripe for man. The fruits and vegetables and the foresttrees were much as we know them, the animals that have been mostserviceable to us were here, spring and summer and fall and wintercame and went, evidently birds sang, insects hummed, flowersbloomed, fruits and grains and nuts ripened, and yet man as man wasnot. 

Under the city of London is a vast deposit of clay in whichthousands of specimens of fossil fruit have been found like ourdate, cocoanut, areca, custard-apple, gourd, melon, coffee, bean, pepper, and cotton plant, but no sign of man. Why was hisdevelopment so tardy? What animal profited by this rich vegetablelife? The hope and promise of the human species at that timeprobably slept in some lowly marsupial. Man has gathered up intohimself, as he traveled his devious way, all the best powers of theanimal kingdom he has passed through. His brain supplies him withall that his body lacks, and more. His specialization is in thishighly developed organ. It is this that separates him so widely fromall other animals. 

Man has no wings, and yet he can soar above the clouds; he is notswift of foot, and yet he can out-speed the fleetest hound or horse;he has but feeble weapons in his organization, and yet he can slayor master all the great beasts; his eye is not so sharp as that ofthe eagle or the vulture, and yet he can see into the farthestdepths of siderial space; he has only very feeble occult powers ofcommunication with his fellows, and yet he can talk around the worldand send his voice across mountains and deserts; his hands are weakthings beside a lion's paw or an elephant's trunk, and yet he canmove mountains and stay rivers and set bounds to the wildest seas. His dog can out-smell him and out-run him and out-bite him, and yethis dog looks up to him as to a god. He has erring reason in placeof unerring instinct, and yet he has changed the face of the planet. 

Without the specialization of the lower animals, --their wonderfuladaptation to particular ends, --their tools, their weapons, theirstrength, their speed, man yet makes them all his servants. Hisbrain is more than a match for all the special advantages nature hasgiven them. The one gift of reason makes him supreme in the world. 

VI

We have a stake in all the past life of the globe. It is no doubt ascientific fact that your existence and mine were involved in thefirst cell that appeared, that the first zoophyte furthered ourfortunes, that the first worm gave us a lift. Great good luck cameto us when the first pair of eyes were invented, probably by thetrilobite back in Silurian times; when the first ear appeared, probably in Carboniferous times; when the first pair of lungs grewout of a fish's air-bladder, probably in Triassic times; when thefirst four-chambered heart was developed and double circulationestablished, probably with the first warm-blooded animal in Mesozoictimes. 

These humble forms started the brain, the nervous system, thecirculation, sight, hearing, smell; they invented the liver, thekidneys, the lungs, the heart, the stomach, and led the way to everyorgan and power my body and mind have to-day. They were thepioneers, they were the dim remote forebears, they conserved andaugmented the fund of life and passed it along. 

All their struggles, their discipline, their battles, theirfailures, their successes, were for you and me. Man has had theexperience of all the animals below him. He has suffered andstruggled as a fish, he has groveled and devoured as a reptile, hehas fought and triumphed as a quadruped, he has lived in trees as amonkey, he has inhabited caves with the wolf and the bear, he hasroamed the forests and plains as a savage, he has survived withoutfire or clothes or weapons or tools, he has lived with the mastodonand all the saurian monsters, he has held his own against greatodds, he has survived the long battles of the land and the sea, heweathered the ice-sheet that overrode both hemispheres, he has seenmany forms become extinct. In the historic period he has survivedplague and pestilence, and want and famine. What must he havesurvived in prehistoric times! What must he have had to contend withas a cave-dweller, as a tree-dweller, as a river-drift man! Beforehe had tools or weapons what must he have had to contend with!

Nature was full of sap and rioted in rude strength well up toQuaternary times, producing extravagant forms which apparently shehad no use for, as she has discontinued them. 

In all these things you and I had our part and lot; of this prodigaloutpouring of life we have reaped the benefit; amid these bizarreforms and this carnival of lust and power, the manward impulse wasnourished and forwarded. In Eocene times nearly half the mammalslived on other animals; it must have been an age of great slaughter. It favored the development of fleetness and cunning, in which we toohave an interest. Our rude progenitor was surely there in some form, and escaped the slaughter. Then or later it is thought he took tothe trees to escape his enemies, as the rats in Jamaica have takento the trees to escape the mongoose. To his tree-climbing weprobably owe our hand, with its opposing thumb. 

In all his disguises he is still our ancestor. His story reads likea fairy book. Never did nimble fancy of childhood invent suchtransformations--only the transformations are so infinitely slow, and attended with such struggle and suffering. Strike out theelement of time and we have before us a spectacle more novel andstartling than any hocus-pocus or legerdemain that ever set thecrowd agape. 

In every form man has passed through, he left behind some old memberor power and took on some new. He left his air-bladder and his gillsand his fins with the fishes; he got his lungs from the dipnoans, the precursors of the amphibians, and from these last he got hisfour limbs; he left some part of his anatomy with the reptile, andtook something in exchange, probably his flexible neck. Somewherealong his line he picked up the four-chambered heart, the warmblood, the placenta, the diaphragm, the plantigrade foot, themammary glands--indeed, what has he not picked up on the long roadof his many transformations? He left some of his superfluousforty-four teeth with his ancestral quadrumana of Eocene times, andkept thirty-two. He picked up his brain somewhere on the road, probably far back in Palaeozoic times, but how has he developed andenlarged it, till it is now the one supreme thing in the world! Hisfear, his cunning, his anger, his treachery, his hoggishness--allhis animal passions--he brought with him from his animal ancestors;but his moral and spiritual nature, his altruism, his veneration, his religious emotions, his aesthetic perceptions--have come to himas a man, supplementing his lower nature, as it were, with anotherorder of senses--a finer sight, a finer touch, wrought in him by thediscipline of life, and the wonder of the world about him, beginningde novo in him only as the wing began de novo in the bird, or thecolor began de novo in the flower--struck out from preexistingpotentialities. The father of the eye is the light, and the fatherof the ear is the vibration of the air, but the father of man'shigher nature is a question of quite another sort. About the onlything in his physical make-up that man can call his own is his chin. None of the orders below him seem to have what can strictly becalled a chin. 

Man owes his five toes and five fingers to the early amphibians ofthe sub-carboniferous times. The first tangible evidence of thesefive toes upon the earth is, to me, very interesting. The earliestrecord of them that I have heard of is furnished by a slab of shalefrom Pennsylvania, upon which, while it was yet soft mud, our firstfive-toed ancestor had left the imprint of his four feet. He wasevidently a small, short-legged gentleman with a stride of onlyabout thirteen inches, and he carried a tail instead of a cane. Hewas probably taking a stroll upon the shores of that vastMediterranean Sea that occupied all the interior of the continentwhen he crossed his mud flat. It was raining that morning--how manymillion years ago?--as we know from the imprint of the raindropsupon the mud. Probably the shower did not cause him to quicken hispace, as amphibians rather like the rain. Just what his immediateforbears were like, or what the forms were that connected him withthe fishes, we shall probably never know. Doubtless the great bookof the rocky strata somewhere holds the secret, if we are ever luckyenough to open it at the right place. How many other secrets, thatevolutionists would like to know, those torn and crumpled leaveshold!

It is something to me to know that it rained that day when ouramphibian ancestor ventured out. The weather was beginning to getorganized also, and settling down to business. It had got beyond thestate of perpetual mist and fog of the earlier ages, and theraindrops were playing their parts. Yet, from all the evidence wehave, we infer that the climate was warm and very humid, like thatof a greenhouse, and that vegetation, mostly giant ferns and rushesand lycopods, was very rank, but there was no grass, or moss, nodeciduous trees, or flowers, or fruit, as we know these things. 

A German anatomist says that we have the vestiges of one hundred andeighty organs which have stuck to us from our animal ancestors, --nowuseless, or often worse than useless, like the vermiform appendix. Eleven of these superannuated and obsolete organs we bring from thefishes, four from amphibians and reptiles. The external ear is avestige--of no use any more. Our dread of snakes we no doubtinherited from our simian ancestors. 

How life refined and humanized as time went on, sobered down andbecame more meditative, keeping step, no doubt, with theamelioration of the soil out of which all life finally comes. Life'sbank account in the soil was constantly increasing; more and more ofthe inorganic was wrought up into the organic; the value of everyclod underfoot was raised. The riot of gigantic forms ceased, andthey became ashes. The giant and uncouth vegetation ceased, and leftashes or coal. The beech, the maple, the oak, the olive, the palmcame in. The giant sea serpents disappeared; the horse, the ox, theswine, the dog, the quail, the dove came in. The placental mammalsdeveloped. The horse grew in size and beauty. When we first comeupon his trail, he is a four-hoof-toed animal no larger than a fox. Later on we find him the size of a sheep with one of his toes gone;still later--many hundred thousand years, no doubt--we find him thesize of a donkey, with still fewer toes, and so on till we reach thesuperb creature we know. 

The creative energy seems to have worked in geologic time and in thegeologic field just as it works here and now, in yonder vineyard orin yonder marsh, --blindly, experimentally, but persistently andsuccessfully. The winged seeds find their proper soil, because theysearch in every direction; the climbing vines find their support, because in the same blind way they feel in all directions. Plantsand animals and races of men grope their way to new fields, to newpowers, to new inventions. 

Indeed, how like an inventor Nature has worked, constantly improvingher models, adding to and changing as experience would seem todictate! She has developed her higher and more complex forms as manhas developed his printing-press, or steam-engine, from rude, simple beginnings. From the two-chambered heart of the fish she madethe treble-chambered heart of the frog, and then the four-chambered heart of the mammal. The first mammary gland had nonipples; the milk oozed out and was licked off by the young. Thenipple was a great improvement, as was the power of suckling in theyoung. 

Experimenting and experimenting endlessly, taking a forward steponly when compelled by necessity, --this is the way ofNature, --experimenting with eyes, with ears, with teeth, with limbs, with feet, with toes, with wings, with bladders and lungs, withscales and armors, hitting upon the backbone only after long trialswith other forms, hitting upon the movable eye only after long agesof other eyes, hitting on the mammal only after long ages ofegg-laying vertebrates, hitting on the placenta onlyrecently, --experimenting all around the circle, discarding andinventing, taking ages to perfect the nervous system, ages and agesto develop the centralized ganglia, the brain. First life was like arabble, a mob, without thought or head, then slowly organizationwent on, as it were, from family to clan, from clan to tribe, fromtribe to nation, or centralized government--the brain of man--allparts duly subordinated and directed, --millions of cells organizedand working on different functions to one grand end, --cooperation, fraternization, division of labor, altruism, etc. 

The cell was the first invention; it is the unit of life, --a speckof protoplasm with a nucleus. To educate this cell till it couldcombine with its fellows and form the higher animals seems to havebeen the aim of the creative energy. First the cell, thencombinations of cells, then combinations of combinations, then moreand more complex combinations till the body of man is reached, whereendless confraternities of cells, all with different functions, working to build and sustain different organs, --brain, heart, liver, muscles, nerves, --yet all working together for one grandend--the body and mind of man. In their last analysis, all made upof the same cells--their combinations and organization making thedifferent forms. 

Evolution touches all forms but tarries with few. Many are calledbut few are chosen--chosen to lead the man-impulse upward. Myriadsof forms are left behind, like driftwood caught in the eddies of acurrent. The clam has always remained a clam, the oyster remained anoyster. The cockroach is about the same creature to-day that it wasuntold aeons ago; so is the shark, and so are many other forms ofmarine life. Often where old species have gone out and new come in, no progress has been made. 

Evolution concentrates along certain lines. The biological treebehaves like another tree, branches die and drop off (species becomeextinct), others mature and remain, while some central shoot pushesupward. Many of the huge reptilian and mammalian branches perishedin comparatively late times. 

As nothing is more evident than that the same measure of life or ofvital energy--power of growth, power of resistance, power ofreproduction--is not meted out equally to all the individuals of aspecies, or to all species, so it is evident that this power ofprogressive development is not meted out equally to all races ofmankind, or to all of the individuals of the same race. The centralimpulse of development seems to have come from the East, in historictimes at least, and to have followed the line of the Mediterranean, to have culminated in Europe. And this progress has certainly beenthe work of a few minds--minds exceptionally endowed. 

For the most part the barbarian races do not progress. Theirexceptional minds or characters do not lead the tribes to higherplanes of thought, In all countries we still see these barbarouspeople which man in his progress has left behind. Our civilizationis like a field of light that fades off into shadows and darkness. There is this margin of undeveloped humanity on all sides. Alwayshas it been so in the animal life of the globe; the higher formshave been pushed up from the lower, and the lower have remained andcontinued to multiply unchanged. 

It seems as if some central and cherished impulse had pushed onthrough each form, and by successive steps had climbed from heightto height, gaining a little here and a little there, intensifyingand concentrating as time went on, very vague and diffuse at first, embryonic so to speak, during the first half of the great geologicyear, but quickening more and more, differentiating more and more, delayed and defeated many times, no doubt, yet never destroyed, leaving form after form unchanged behind it, till it at last reachedits goal in man. 

After evolution has done all it can do for us toward solving themystery of creation, much remains unsolved. 

Through evolution we see creation in travail-pains for millions ofyears to bring forth the varied forms of life as we know them; butthe mystery of the inception of this life, and of the origin of thelaws that have governed its development, remains. What lies back ofit all? Who or what planted the germ of the biological tree, andpredetermined all its branches? What determined one branch toeventuate in man, another in the dog, the horse, the bird, or thereptile?

From the finite or human point of view we feel compelled to say somevaster being or intelligence must have had the thought of all thesethings from the beginning or before the beginning. 

It is quite impossible for me to believe that fortuitousvariation--variation all around the circle--could have resulted inthe evolution of man. There must have been a predetermined tendencyto variation in certain directions. To introduce chance into theworld is to introduce chaos. No more would the waters of theinteriors of the continents find their way to the sea, were therenot a slant in that direction, than could haphazard variation, though checked and controlled by natural selection, result in theproduction of the race of man. This view may be only the outcome ofour inevitable anthropomorphism which we cannot escape from, nomatter how deep we dive or high we soar. 

II

THE DIVINE ABYSS

I

In making the journey to the great Southwest, --Colorado, NewMexico, and Arizona, --if one does not know his geology, he is prettysure to wish he did, there is so much geology scattered over allthese Southwestern landscapes, crying aloud to be read. The book ofearthly revelation, as shown by the great science, lies wide open inthat land, as it does in few other places on the globe. Its leavesfairly flutter in the wind, and the print is so large that he whoruns on the California Limited may read it. Not being able to readit at all, or not taking any interest in it, is like going to Romeor Egypt or Jerusalem, knowing nothing of the history of thoselands. 

Of course, we have just as much geology in the East and Middle West, but the books are closed and sealed, as it were, by the enormouslapse of time since these portions of the continent became dry land. The eroding and degrading forces have ages since passed the meridianof their day's work, and grass and verdure hide their footsteps. Butin the great West and Southwest, the gods of erosion and degradationseem yet in the heat and burden of the day's toil. Their unfinishedlandscapes meet the eye on every hand. Many of the mountains look asif they were blocked out but yesterday, and one sees vast nakedflood-plains, and painted deserts and bad lands and drylake-bottoms, that suggest a world yet in the making. 

Some force has scalped the hills, ground the mountains, strangledthe rivers, channeled the plains, laid bare the succession ofgeologic ages, stripping off formation after formation like agarment, 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. Ifwe break the slab in the prying, and thus secure only part of it, leaving an abrupt jagged edge on the part that remains, we havestill a better likeness of the work of these great geologicquarrymen. But other workmen, invisible to our eyes, have carvedthese jagged edges into novel and beautiful forms. 

The East is old, old! the West, with the exception of the RockyMountains, is of yesterday in comparison. The Hudson was an ancientriver before the Mississippi was born, and the Catskills were beingslowly carved from a vast plateau while the rocks that were to formmany of the Western ranges were being laid down as sediment in thebottom of the sea. California is yet in her teens, while New Englandin comparison is an octogenarian. Just as much geology in the Eastas in the West, did I say? Not as much visible geology, not as muchby many chapters of earth history, not as much by all the laterformations, by most of the Mesozoic and Tertiary deposits. The vastseries of sedimentary rocks since the Carboniferous age, to saynothing of the volcanic, that make up these periods, are largelywanting east of the Mississippi, except in New Jersey and in some ofthe Gulf States. They are recent. They are like the history of ourown period compared with that of Egypt and Judea. It is mainly theselater formations--the Permian, the Jurassic, the Triassic, theCretaceous, the Eocene, --that give the prevailing features to theSouth-western landscape that so astonish Eastern eyes. From themcome most of the petrified remains of that great army of extinctreptiles and mammals--the three-toed horse, the sabre-toothedtiger, the brontosaurus, the fin-backed lizard, the imperialmammoth, the various dinosaurs, some of them gigantic in form andfearful in aspect--that of late years have appeared in our museumsand that throw so much light upon the history of the animal life ofthe globe. Most of the sedimentary rocks of New York and New Englandwere laid down before these creatures existed. 

Now I am not going to write an essay on the geology of the West, forI really have little first-hand knowledge upon that subject, but Iwould indicate the kind of interest in the country I was mostconscious of during my recent trip to the Pacific Coast and beyond. Indeed, quite a geologic fever raged in me most of the time. Therocks attracted me more than the birds, the sculpturing of thelandscapes engaged my attention more than the improvements of thefarms--what Nature had done more than what man was doing. The purelyscenic aspects of the country are certainly remarkable, and thehuman aspects interesting, but underneath these things, and strikingthrough them, lies a vast world of time and change that to me isstill more remarkable, and still more interesting. I could not lookout of the car windows without seeing the spectre of geologic timestalking across the hills and plains. 

As one leaves the prairie States and nears the great Southwest, hefinds Nature in a new mood--she is dreaming of canyons; both cliffsand soil have canyon stamped upon them, so that your eye, if alert, is slowly prepared for the wonders of rock-carving it is to see onthe Colorado. The canyon form seems inherent in soil and rock. Thechannels of the little streams are canyons, vertical sides of adobesoil, as deep as they are broad, rectangle grooves in the ground. 

Through all this arid region nature is abrupt, angular, andsudden--the plain squarely abutting the cliff, the cliff walling thecanon; the dry water-course sunk in the plain like a carpenter'sgroove into a plank. Cloud and sky look the same as at home, but theearth is a new earth--new geologically, and new in the lines of itslandscapes. It seems by the forms she develops that Nature must usetools that she long since discarded in the East. She works as ifwith the square and the saw and the compass, and uses implementsthat cut like chisels and moulding-planes. Right lines, well-defined angles, and tablelike tops of buttes and mesasalternate with perfect curves, polished domes, carved needles, andfluted escarpments. 

In the features of our older landscapes there is little or nothingthat suggests architectural forms or engineering devices; in the FarWest one sees such forms and devices everywhere. 

In visiting the Petrified Forests in northern Arizona we stood onthe edge of a great rolling plain and looked down upon a wide, deeply eroded stretch of country below us that suggested a vast armyencampment, covered as it was with great dome-shaped, tent-likemounds of a light terra-cotta color, with open spaces like streetsor avenues between them. There were hundreds or thousands of theseearthy tents stretching away for twenty-five miles. Along thehorizon was a gigantic stockade of red, rounded pillars, or a solidline of mosque-like temples. How unreal, how spectral it all seemed!Not a sound or sign of life in the whole painted solitude--adeserted camp, or one upon which the silence of death had fallen. Here, in Carboniferous times, grew the gigantic fern-like trees, theSigillaria and Lepidodendron, whose petrified trunks, for aeonsburied beneath the deposit of the Permian seas, and then, duringother aeons, slowly uncovered by the gentle action of the erodingrains, we saw scattered on the ground. 

You first see Nature beginning to form the canon habit in Coloradoand making preliminary studies for her masterpiece, the GrandCanon. Huge square towers and truncated cones and needles andspires break the horizon-lines. Here all her water-courses, wet ordry, are deep grooves in the soil, with striking and pretty carvingsand modelings adorning their vertical sides. In the railway cuts yousee the same effects--miniature domes and turrets and other canonfeatures carved out by the rains. The soil is massive and does notcrumble like ours and seek the angle of repose; it gives way inmasses like a brick wall. It is architectural soil, it seeksapproximately the right angle--the level plain or the vertical wall. It erodes easily under running water, but it does not slide; sandand clay are in such proportions as to make a brittle but not afriable soil. 

Before you are out of Colorado, you begin to see these novelarchitectural features on the horizon-line--the canon turned bottomside up, as it were. In New Mexico, the canon habit of the erosionforces is still more pronounced. The mountain-lines are often asarchitectural in the distance, or arbitrary, as the sky-line of acity. You may see what you half persuade yourself is a huge brickbuilding notching the horizon, --an asylum, a seminary, a hotel, --butit is only a fragment of red sandstone, carved out by wind and rain. 

Presently the high colors of the rocks appear--high cliffs withterra-cotta facades, and a new look in the texture of the rocks, asoft, beaming, less frowning expression, and colored as if by theWestern sunsets. We are looking upon much younger rocks geologicallythan we see at home, and they have the tints and texture of youth. The landscape and the mountains look young, because they lookunfinished, like a house half up. The workmen have but just knockedoff work to go to dinner; their great trenches, their freshly openedquarries, their huge dumps, their foundations, their cyclopeanmasonry, their half-finished structures breaking the horizon-lines, their square gashes through the mountains, --all impress the eyes ofa traveler from the eastern part of the continent, where theearth-building and earth-carving forces finished their work agesago. 

II

Hence it is that when one reaches the Grand canon of the Colorado, if he has kept his eyes and mind open, he is prepared to seestriking and unusual things. But he cannot be fully prepared forjust what he does see, no matter how many pictures of it he may haveseen, or how many descriptions of it he may have read. 

A friend of mine who took a lively interest in my Western trip wroteme that he wished he could have been present with his kodak when wefirst looked upon the Grand Canon. Did he think he could have got apicture of our souls? His camera would have shown him only oursilent, motionless forms as we stood transfixed by that first viewof the stupendous spectacle. Words do not come readily to one'slips, or gestures to one's body, in the presence of such a scene. One of my companions said that the first thing that came into hermind was the old text, "Be still, and know that I am God. " To bestill on such an occasion is the easiest thing in the world, and tofeel the surge of solemn and reverential emotions is equally easy;is, indeed, almost inevitable. The immensity of the scene, itstranquillity, its order, its strange, new beauty, and the monumentalcharacter of its many forms--all these tend to beget in the beholderan attitude of silent wonder and solemn admiration. I wished at themoment that we might have been alone with the gloriousspectacle, --that we had hit upon an hour when the public had gone todinner. The smoking and joking tourists sauntering along in apparentindifference, or sitting with their backs to the great geologicdrama, annoyed me. I pity the person who can gaze upon the spectacleunmoved. Some are actually terrified by it. I was told of a strongman, an eminent lawyer from a Western city, who literally fell tothe earth at the first view, and could not again be induced to lookupon it. I saw a woman prone upon the ground near the brink at HopiPoint, weeping silently and long; but from what she afterward toldme I know it was not from terror or sorrow, but from theoverpowering gladness of the ineffable beauty and harmony of thescene. It moved her like the grandest music. Her inebriate soulcould find relief only in tears. 

Harriet Monroe was so wrought up by the first view that she says shehad to fight against the desperate temptation to fling herself downinto the soft abyss, and thus redeem the affront which the verybeating of her heart had offered to the inviolable solitude. CharlesDudley Warner said of it, "I experienced for a moment anindescribable terror of nature, a confusion of mind, a fear to bealone in such a presence. "

It is beautiful, oh, how beautiful! but it is a beauty that awakensa feeling of solemnity and awe. We call it the "Divine Abyss. " Itseems as much of heaven as of earth. Of the many descriptions of it, none seems adequate. To rave over it, or to pour into it a torrentof superlatives, is of little avail. My companion came nearer themark when she quietly repeated from Revelation, "And he carried meaway in the spirit to a great and high mountain, and shewed me thatgreat city, the holy Jerusalem. " It does, indeed, suggest a far-off, half-sacred antiquity, some greater Jerusalem, Egypt, Babylon, orIndia. We speak of it as a scene: it is more like a vision, soforeign is it to all other terrestrial spectacles, and sosurpassingly beautiful. 

To ordinary folk the sight is so extraordinary, so unlike everythingone's experience has yielded, and so unlike the results of the usualhaphazard working of the blind forces of nature, that I did notwonder when people whom I met on the rim asked me what I supposeddid all this. I could even sympathize with the remark of an oldwoman visitor who is reported to have said that she thought they hadbuilt the canon too near the hotel. The enormous cleavage which thecanon shows, the abrupt drop from the brink of thousands of feet, the sheer faces of perpendicular walls of dizzy height, give atfirst the impression that it is all the work of some titanicquarryman, who must have removed cubic miles of strata as we removecubic yards of earth. Go out to Hopi Point or O'Neil's Point, and, as you emerge from the woods, you get a glimpse of a blue orrose-purple gulf opening before you. The solid ground ceasessuddenly, and an aerial perspective, vast and alluring, takes itsplace; another heaven, countersunk in the earth, transfixes you onthe brink. "Great God!" I can fancy the first beholder of it saying, "what is this? Do I behold the transfiguration of the earth? Has thesolid ground melted into thin air? Is there a firmament below aswell as above? Has the earth veil at last been torn aside, and thered heart of the globe been laid bare?" If this first witness wasnot at once overcome by the beauty of the earthly revelation beforehim, or terrified by its strangeness and power, he must have stoodlong, awed, spellbound, speechless with astonishment, and thrilledwith delight. He may have seen vast and glorious prospects frommountaintops, he may have looked down upon the earth and seen itunroll like a map before him; but he had never before looked intothe earth as through a mighty window or open door, and beheld depthsand gulfs of space, with their atmospheric veils and illusions andvast perspectives, such as he had seen from mountain-summits, butwith a wealth of color and a suggestion of architectural andmonumental remains, and a strange, almost unearthly beauty, such asno mountain-view could ever have afforded him. Three features of thecanon strike one at once: its unparalleled magnitude, itsarchitectural forms and suggestions, and its opulence of coloreffects--a chasm nearly a mile deep and from ten to twenty mileswide, in which Niagara would be only as a picture upon your walls, in which the Pyramids, seen from the rim, would appear only likelarge tents, in which the largest building upon the earth woulddwindle to insignificant proportions. There are amphitheatres andmighty aisles eight miles long and three or four miles wide andthree or four thousand feet deep. There are room-like spaces eighthundred feet high; there are well-defined alcoves with openings amile wide; there are niches six hundred feet high overhung by archedlintels; there are pinnacles and rude statues from one hundred totwo hundred feet high. Here I am running at once into allusions tothe architectural features and suggestions of the canon, which mustplay a prominent part in all faithful attempts to describe it. Thereare huge, truncated towers, vast, horizontal mouldings; there is thesemblance of balustrades on the summit of a noble facade. In one ofthe immense halls we saw, on an elevated platform, the outlines ofthree enormous chairs, fifty feet or more high, and behind and abovethem the suggestion of three more chairs in partial ruin. Indeed, there is such an opulence of architectural forms in this divineabyss as one has never before dreamed of seeing wrought by the blindforces of nature. These forces have here foreshadowed all thenoblest architecture of the world. Many of the vast carved andornamental masses which diversify the canon have been fitly namedtemples, as Shiva's Temple, a mile high, carved out of the redCarboniferous limestone, and remarkably symmetrical in its outlines. Near it is the Temple of Isis, the Temple of Osiris, the BuddhaTemple, the Horus Temple, and the Pyramid of Cheops. Farther to theeast is the Diva Temple, the Brahma Temple, the Temple of Zoroaster, and the Tomb of Odin. Indeed, everywhere are there suggestions oftemples and tombs, pagodas and pyramids, on a scale that no work ofhuman hands can rival. "The grandest objects, " says Major Dutton, "are merged in a congregation of others equally grand. " With thewealth of form goes a wealth of color. Never, I venture to say, werereds and browns and grays and vermilions more appealing to the eyethan they are as they softly glow in this great canyon. Thecolor-scheme runs from the dark, sombre hue of the gneiss at thebottom, up through the yellowish brown of the Cambrian layers, andon up through seven or eight broad bands of varying tints of red andvermilion, to the broad yellowish-gray at the top. 

III

The north side of the canyon has been much more deeply andelaborately carved than the south side; most of the greatarchitectural features are on the north side--the huge temples andfortresses and amphitheatres. The strata dip very gently to thenorth and northeast, while the slope of the surface is to the southand southeast. This has caused the drainage from the great northernplateaus to flow into the canyon and thus cut and carve the northside as we behold it. 

The visitor standing upon the south side looks across the greatchasm upon the bewildering maze of monumental forms, some of them assuggestive of human workmanship as anything in nature well can be, --crumbling turrets and foundations, forms as distinctly square asany work of man's hands, vast fortress-like structures with salientsand entering angles and wing walls resisting the siege of time, hugepyramidal piles rising story on story, three thousand feet or moreabove their foundations, each successive story or superstructurefaced by a huge vertical wall which rises from a sloping talus thatconnects it with the story next below. The slopes or talusesrepresent the softer rock, the vertical walls the harder layers. Usually four or five of these receding stories make up each templeor pyramid. Some of the larger structures show all the strata fromthe cap of light Carboniferous limestone at the top to the grayCambrian sandstone at the bottom. From others, such as the Temple ofIsis, all the upper formations are gone with a pile of disintegratedred sandstone, like a mass of brick dust on the top where thefragment of the old red wall made its last stand. In those masses, which are still crowned with the light gray limestone, one sees howsurely the process of disintegration is going on by the fragmentsand debris of light gray rock, like the chips of giant workmen, thatstrew the deeper-colored slopes below them. These fragments fade outas the eye drops down the slopes, as if they had melted like bits ofice. Indeed, the melting of ice and the dissolution of a rock do notdiffer much except that one is very rapid and the other infinitelyslow. In time (not man's time, but the Lord's time), all these lightmasses that cap the huge temples will be weathered away, yea, andall the vast red layers beneath them, and the huge structures willbe slowly consumed by time. The Colorado River will carry theirashes to the sea, and where they once stood will be seen gray, desert-like plateaus. Their outlines now stand out like skeletonsfrom which the flesh has been removed--sharp, angular, obtrusive, but bound together as by ligaments of granite. The tooth of timegnaws at them day and night and has been gnawing for thousands ofcenturies, so that in some cases only their stumps remain. From theTemple of Isis and the Tomb of Odin the two or three upper storiesare gone. 

On the next page is the ground plan of the Temple of Isis, abouttwenty-five hundred feet high. The first story is about a thousandfeet; the second, three hundred and fifty feet; the third, onehundred and fifty feet; the fourth, five hundred feet; and thefifth, five hundred feet. The finish at the top shows as a heavycrumbling wall, probably one hundred feet or more high. How the massseems to be resisting the siege of time, throwing out its salientshere and there, and meeting the onset of the foes like a militaryengineer. 

The pyramidal form of these rock-masses is accounted for by the factthat they were carved out from the top downward, and that eachsuccessive story is vastly older than the one immediately beneathit. The erosive forces have been working whole geologic ages longeron the top layer of rock than on the bottom layer; hence the topmostones are entirely gone or else reduced to small dimensions. But whatfeature or quality of the rock it is that lends itself so readily orso inevitably to these architectural forms--the four squarefoundations, the end pilasters and balustrades, and so on--is to menot so clear. The peculiar rectangular jointings, the alternation ofsoft and hard layers, the nearly horizontal strata, and otherthings, no doubt, enter into the problem. Many of these features arefound in our older geology of the East, as in the Catskills--horizontal strata, hard and soft layers alternating, but with thevertical jointing less pronounced; hence the Catskills have fewcanon-like valleys, though there are here and there huge gashesthrough the mountains that give a canon effect, and there aregigantic walls high up on the face of some of the mountains thatsuggest one side of a mighty canon. In the climate of the Catskillsthe rock-masses of the Colorado would crumble much more rapidly thanthey do here. The lines of many of these natural temples orfortresses are still more lengthened and attenuated than those ofthe Temple of Isis, appearing like mere skeletons of their formerselves. The forms that weather out the formation above this, thePermian, appear to be more rotund, and tend more to domes androunded hills. 

One of the most surprising features of the Grand canon is itscleanness--its freedom from debris. It is a home of the gods, sweptand garnished; no litter or confusion or fragments of fallen andbroken rocky walls anywhere. Those vast sloping taluses are as cleanas a meadow; rarely at the foot of the huge vertical walls do yousee a fragment of fallen rock. It is as if the processes of erosionand degradation were as gentle as the dews and the snows, and carvedout this mighty abyss grain by grain, which has probably been thecase. That much of this red sandstone, from the amount of iron itcontains, or from some other cause, disintegrates easily andrapidly, is very obvious. Looking down from Hopi Point upon a vastridge called the "Man-of-War, " one sees on the top, where once theremust have been a huge wall of rock, a long level area of red soilthat suggests a garden, the more so because it is regularly dividedup into sections by straight lines of huge stone placed as if by thehands of man. 

One's sense of the depths of the canyon is so great that it almostmakes one dizzy to see the little birds fly out over it, or plungedown into it. One seems to fear that they too will get dizzy andfall to the bottom. We watched a line of tourists on mules creepingalong the trail across the inner plateau, and the unaided eye hadtrouble to hold them; they looked like little red ants. The eye hasmore difficulty in estimating sizes and distances beneath it thanwhen they are above or on a level with it, because it is so muchless familiar with depth than with height or lateral dimensions. 

Another remarkable and unexpected feature of the canyon is its lookof ordered strength. Nearly all the lines are lines of greateststrength. The prevailing profile line everywhere is that shownherewith. The upright lines represent lines of cyclopean masonry, and the slant is the talus that connects them, covered with a short, sage-colored growth of some kind, and as soft to the eye as the turfof our fields. The simple, strong structural lines assert themselveseverywhere, and give that look of repose and security characteristicof the scene. The rocky forces always seem to retreat in good orderbefore the onslaught of time; there is neither rout nor confusion;everywhere they present a calm upright front to the foe. And thefallen from their ranks, where are they? A cleaner battlefieldbetween the forces of nature one rarely sees. 

The weaker portions are, of course, constantly giving way. Theelements incessantly lay siege to these fortresses and takeadvantage of every flaw or unguarded point, so that what stands hasbeen seven times, yea, seventy times seven times tested, and hencegives the impression of impregnable strength. The angles and curves, the terraces and foundations, seem to be the work of some masterengineer, with only here and there a toppling rock. 

I was puzzled to explain to myself the reason of a certain friendlyand familiar look which the great abyss had for me. One sees orfeels at a glance that it was not born of the throes and convulsionsof nature--of earthquake shock or volcanic explosion. It does notsuggest the crush of matter and the wreck of worlds. Clearly it isthe work of the more gentle and beneficent forces. This probablyaccounts for the friendly look. Some of the inner slopes andplateaus seemed like familiar ground to me: I must have played uponthem when a school-boy. Bright Angel Creek, for some inexplicablereason, recalled a favorite trout-stream of my native hills, and theold Cambrian plateau that edges the inner chasm, as we looked downupon it from nearly four thousand feet above, looked like the brownmeadow where we played ball in the old school-days, friendly, tender, familiar, in its slopes and terraces, in its tints andbasking sunshine, but grand and awe-inspiring in its depths, itshuge walls, and its terrific precipices. 

The geologists are agreed that the canyon is only of yesterday ingeologic time, --the Middle Tertiary, --and yet behold the duration ofthat yesterday as here revealed, probably a million years or more!We can no more form any conception of such time than we can of thesize of the sun or of the distance of the fixed stars. 

The forces that did all this vast delving and sculpturing--the air, the rains, the frost, the sunshine--are as active now as they everwere; but their activity is a kind of slumbering that rarely makes asign. Only at long intervals is the silence of any part of theprofound abyss broken by the fall of loosened rocks or slidingtalus. We ourselves saw where a huge splinter of rock had recentlydropped from the face of the cliff. In time these loosened massesdisappear, as if they melted like ice. A city not made with hands, but as surely not eternal in the earth! In our humid and severeEastern climate, frost and ice and heavyrains working together, allthese architectural forms would have crumbled long ago, and fertilefields or hill-slopes would have taken their place. In the olderHawaiian Islands, which probably also date from Tertiary times, therains have carved enormous canons and amphitheatres out of the hardvolcanic rock, in some places grinding the mountains to such a thinedge that a man may literally sit astride them, each leg pointinginto opposite valleys. In the next geologic age, the temples andmonuments of the Grand Canon will have largely disappeared, and thestupendous spectacle will be mainly a thing of the past. 

It seems to take millions of years to tame a mountain, to curb itsrude, savage power, to soften its outlines, and bring fertility outof the elemental crudeness and barrenness. But time and the gentlerains of heaven will do it, as they have done it in the East, and asthey are fast doing it in the West. 

An old guide with whom I talked, who had lived in and about thecanon for twenty-six years, said, "While we have been sitting here, the canon has widened and deepened"; which was, of course, theliteral truth, the mathematical truth, but the widening anddeepening could not have been apprehended by human sense. 

Our little span of human life is far too narrow for us to be awitness of any of the great earth changes. These changes are soslow, --oh, so slow, --and human history is so brief. So far as we areconcerned, the gods of the earth sit in council behind closed doors. All the profound, formative, world-shaping forces of nature go on ina realm that we can reach only through our imaginations. They so fartranscend our human experiences that it requires an act of faith toapprehend them. The repose of the hills and the mountains, howprofound! yet they may be rising or sinking before our very eyes, and we detect no sign. Only on exceptional occasions, duringearthquakes or volcanic eruptions, is their dreamless slumber rudelydisturbed. 

Geologists tell us that from the great plateau in which the GrandCanon is cut, layers of rock many thousands of feet thick were cutaway before the canon was begun. 

Starting from the high plateau of Utah, and going south toward thecanon, we descend a grand geologic stairway, every shelf or tread ofwhich consists of different formations fifty or more miles broad, from the Eocene, at an altitude of over ten thousand feet at thestart, across the Cretaceous, the Jurassic, the Triassic, thePermian, to the Carboniferous, which is the bottom or landing of theGrand Canon plateau at an altitude of about five thousand feet. Eachstep terminates more or less abruptly, the first by a drop of eighthundred feet, ornamented by rows of square obelisks and pilasters ofuniform pattern and dimension, "giving the effect, " says MajorDutton, "of a gigantic colonnade from which the entablature has beenremoved or has fallen in ruins. "

The next step, or platform, the Cretaceous, slopes down gradually ordies out on the step beneath it; then comes the Jurassic, which endsin white sandstone cliffs several hundred feet high; then theTriassic, which ends in the famous vermilion cliffs thousands offeet high, most striking in color and in form; then the Permiantread, which also ends in striking cliffs, with their own style ofcolor and architecture; and, lastly, the great Carboniferousplatform in which the canon itself is carved. Now, all these variousstrata above the canon, making at one time a thickness of over amile, were worn away in Pliocene times, before the cutting of theGrand Canon began. Had they remained, and been cut through, weshould have had a chasm two miles deep instead of one mile. 

The cutting power of a large, rapid volume of water, like theColorado, charged with sand and gravel, is very great. According toMajor Dutton, in the hydraulic mines of California, the escapingwater has been known to cut a chasm from twelve to twenty feet deepin hard basaltic rock, in a single year. This is, of course, exceptional, but there have, no doubt, been times when the Coloradocut downward very rapidly. The enormous weathering of its side wallsis to me the more wonderful, probably because the forces that haveachieved this task are silent and invisible, and, so far as ourexperience goes, so infinitely slow in their action. The river is atremendous machine for grinding and sawing and transporting, but therains and the frost and the air and the sunbeams smite the rocks aswith weapons of down, and one is naturally incredulous as to theirdestructive effects. 

Some of the smaller rivers in the plateau region flow in very deepbut very narrow canons. The rocks being harder and more homogeneous, the weathering has been slight. The meteoric forces have not taken ahand in the game. Thus the Parunuweap Canon is only twenty tothirty feet wide, but from six hundred to fifteen hundred feet deep. 

I suppose the slow, inappreciable erosion to which the old guidealluded would have cut the canon since Middle Tertiary times. Theriver, eating downward at the rate of one sixteenth of an inch ayear, would do it in about one million years. At half that rate itwould do it in double that time. In the earlier part of its history, when the rainfall was doubtless greater, and the river fuller, theerosion must have been much more rapid than it is at present. Thewidening of the canon was doubtless a slower process than thedownward cutting. But, as I have said, the downward cutting wouldtend to check itself from age to age, while the widening processwould go steadily forward. Hence, when we look into the great abyss, we have only to remember the enormous length of time that the aerialand subaerial forces have been at work to account for it. 

Two forces, or kinds of forces, have worked together in excavatingthe canon: the river, which is the primary factor, and the meteoricforces, which may be called the secondary, as they follow in thewake of the former. The river starts the gash downward, then theaerial forces begin to eat into the sides. Acting alone, the riverwould cut a trench its own width, and were the rocks through whichit saws one homogeneous mass, or of uniform texture and hardness, the width of the trench would probably have been very uniform andmuch less than it is now. The condition that has contributed to itsgreat width is the heterogeneity of the different formations--somehard and some soft. The softer bands, of course, introduce theelement of weakness. They decay and crumble the more rapidly, andthus undermine the harder bands overlying them, which, by reason oftheir vertical fractures, break off and fall to the bottom, wherethey are exposed to the action of floods and are sooner or laterground up in the river's powerful maw. Hence the recession of thebanks of the canon has gone steadily on with the downward cutting ofthe river. Where the rock is homogeneous, as it is in the innerchasm of the dark gneiss, the widening process seems to have gone onmuch more slowly. Geologists account for the great width of the mainchasm when compared with the depth, on the theory that the forcesthat work laterally have been more continuously active than has theforce that cuts downward. There is convincing evidence that thewhole region has been many times lifted up since the cutting began, so that the river has had its active and passive stages. As itschannel approached the sea level, its current would be much lessrapid, and the downward cutting would practically cease, till thesection was elevated again. But all the time the forces workinglaterally would be at work without interruption, and would thus gainon their checked brethren of the river bottom. 

There is probably another explanation of what we see here. Apartfrom the mechanical weathering of the rocks as a result of the aridclimate, wherein rapid and often extreme changes of temperature takeplace, causing the surface of the rocks to flake or scale off, therehas doubtless been unusual chemical weathering, and this has beenlargely brought about by the element of iron that all these rockspossess. Their many brilliant colors are imparted to them by thevarious compounds of iron which enter into their composition. Andiron, though the symbol of hardness and strength, is an element ofweakness in rocks, as it causes them to oxidize or disintegrate morerapidly. In the marble canon, where apparently the rock contains noiron, the lateral erosion has been very little, though the river hascut a trench as deep as it has in other parts of its course. 

How often I thought during those days at the canon of the geology ofmy native hills amid the Catskills, which show the effects ofdenudation as much older than that shown here as this is older thanthe washout in the road by this morning's shower! The old redsandstone in which I hoed corn as a farm-boy dates back to MiddlePalaeozoic time, or to the spring of the great geologic year, whilethe canon is of the late autumn. Could my native hills have repliedto my mute questionings, they would have said: "We were old, old, and had passed through the canon stage long before the Grand Canonwas born. We have had all that experience, and have forgotten itages ago. No vestiges of our canons remain. They have all been worndown and obliterated by the strokes of a hand as gentle as that of apassing cloud. Where they were, are now broad, fertile valleys, withrounded knolls and gentle slopes, and the sound of peacefulhusbandry. The great ice sheet rubbed us and ploughed us, but ourcontours were gentle and rounded aeons before that event. When theGrand Canon is as old as we are, all its superb architecturalfeatures will have long since disappeared, its gigantic walls willhave crumbled, and rolling plains and gentle valleys will have takenits place. " All of which seems quite probable. With time enough, thegentle forces of air and water will surely change the whole aspectof this tremendous chasm. 

On the second day we made the descent into the canon on mule-back. There is always satisfaction in going to the bottom of things. Thenwe wanted to get on more intimate terms with the great abyss, towrestle with it, if need be, and to feel its power, as well as tobehold it. It is not best always to dwell upon the rim of things orto look down upon them from afar. The summits are good, but thevalleys have their charm, also; even the valley of humiliation hasits lessons. At any rate, four of us were unanimous in our desire tosound that vast profound on mule-back, trusting that the return tripwould satisfy our "climbing" aspirations, as it did. 

It is quite worth while to go down into the canon on mule-back, ifonly to fall in love with a mule, and to learn what a sure-footed, careful, and docile creature, when he is on his good behavior, amule can be. My mule was named "Johnny, " and there was soon a goodunderstanding between us. I quickly learned to turn the wholeproblem of that perilous descent over to him. He knew how to takethe sharp turns and narrow shelves of that steep zigzag much betterthan I did. I do not fancy that the thought of my safety was"Johnny's" guiding star; his solicitude struck nearer home thanthat. There was much ice and snow on the upper part of the trail, and only those slender little legs of "Johnny's" stood between meand a tumble of two or three thousand feet. How cautiously he felthis way with his round little feet, as, with lowered head, he seemedto be scanning the trail critically! Only when he swung around thesharp elbows of the trail did his forefeet come near the edge of thebrink. Only once or twice at such times, as we hung for a breathabove the terrible incline, did I feel a slight shudder. One of mycompanions, who had never before been upon an animal's back, so fellin love with her "Sandy" that she longed for a trunk big enough inwhich to take him home with her. 

It was more than worth while to make the descent to traverse thatCambrian plateau, which from the rim is seen to flow out from thebase of the enormous cliffs to the brink of the inner chasm, lookinglike some soft, lavender-colored carpet or rug. I had never seen theCambrian rocks, the lowest of the stratified formations, nor set myfoot upon Cambrian soil. Hence a new experience was promised me. Rocky layers probably two or three miles thick had been worn awayfrom the old Cambrian foundations, and when I looked down upon thatgently undulating plateau, the thought of the eternity of time whichit represented tended quite as much to make me dizzy as did the dropof nearly four thousand feet. We found it gravelly and desert-like, covered with cacti, low sagebrush, and other growths. The dim trailled us to its edge, where we could look down into thetwelve-hundred-foot V-shaped gash which the river had cut into thedark, crude-looking Archaean rock. How distinctly it looked like anew day in creation where the horizontal, yellowish-gray beds of theCambrian were laid down upon the dark, amorphous, and twisted oldergranite! How carefully the level strata had been fitted to theshapeless mass beneath it! It all looked like the work of a mastermason; apparently you could put the point of your knife where oneended and the other began. The older rock suggested chaos andturmoil; the other suggested order and plan, as if the builder hadsaid, "Now upon this foundation we will build our house. " It is aninteresting fact, the full geologic significance of which I supposeI do not appreciate, that the different formations are usuallymarked off from one another in just this sharp way, as if each onewas, indeed, the work of a separate day of creation. Nature appearsat long intervals to turn over a new leaf and start a new chapter inher great book. The transition from one geologic age to anotherappears to be abrupt: new colors, new constituents, new qualitiesappear in the rocks with a suddenness hard to reconcile with Lyell'sdoctrine of uniformitarianism, just as new species appear in thelife of the globe with an abruptness hard to reconcile with Darwin'sslow process of natural selection. Is sudden mutation, after all, the key to all these phenomena?

We ate our lunch on the old Cambrian table, placed there for us solong ago, and gazed down upon the turbulent river hiding andreappearing in its labyrinthian channel so far below us. It is worthwhile to make the descent in order to look upon the river which hasbeen the chief quarryman in excavating the canon, and to find howinadequate it looks for the work ascribed to it. Viewed from wherewe sat, I judged it to be forty or fifty feet broad, but I wasassured that it was between two and three hundred feet. Water andsand are ever symbols of instability and inconstancy, but let themwork together, and they saw through mountains, and undermine thefoundations of the hills. 

It is always worth while to sit or kneel at the feet of grandeur, tolook up into the placid faces of the earth gods and feel theirpower, and the tourist who goes down into the canon certainly hasthis privilege. We did not bring back in our hands, or in our hats, the glory that had lured us from the top, but we seemed to have beennearer its sources, and to have brought back a deepened sense of themagnitude of the forms, and of the depth of the chasm which we hadheretofore gazed upon from a distance. Also we had plucked theflower of safety from the nettle danger, always an exhilaratingenterprise. 

In climbing back, my eye, now sharpened by my geologic reading, dwelt frequently and long upon the horizon where that cross-beddedCarboniferous sandstone joins the Carboniferous limestone above it. How much older the sandstone looked! I could not avoid theimpression that its surface must have formed a plane of erosion agesand ages before the limestone had been laid down upon it. 

We had left plenty of ice and snow at the top, but in the bottom wefound the early spring flowers blooming, and a settler at what iscalled the Indian Gardens was planting his garden. Here I heard thesong of the canon wren, a new and very pleasing bird-song to me. Ithink our dreams were somewhat disturbed that night by theimpressions of the day, but our day-dreams since that time have atleast been sweeter and more comforting, and I am sure that theremainder of our lives will be the richer for our having seen theGrand Canon. 

III

THE SPELL OF THE YOSEMITE

I

Yosemite won my heart at once, as it seems to win the hearts of allwho visit it. In my case many things helped to do it, but I am surea robin, the first I had seen since leaving home, did his part. Hestruck the right note, he brought the scene home to me, he suppliedthe link of association. There he was, running over the grass orperching on the fence, or singing from a tree-top in the oldfamiliar way. Where the robin is at home, there at home am I. Butmany other things helped to win my heart to the Yosemite--the wholecharacter of the scene, not only its beauty and sublimity, but theair of peace and protection, and of homelike seclusion that pervadesit; the charm of a nook, a retreat, combined with the power andgrandeur of nature in her sternest moods. 

After passing from the hotel at El Portal along the foaming androaring Merced River, and amid the tumbled confusion of enormousgranite boulders shaken down from the cliffs above, you cross thethreshold of the great valley as into some vast house or hall carvedout of the mountains, and at once feel the spell of the broodingcalm and sheltered seclusion that pervades it. You pass suddenlyfrom the tumultuous, the chaotic, into the ordered, the tranquil, the restful, which seems enhanced by the power and grandeur thatencompass them about. You can hardly be prepared for the hush thatsuddenly falls upon the river and for the gentle rural and sylvancharacter of much that surrounds you; the peace of the fields, theseclusion of the woods, the privacy of sunny glades, the enchantmentof falls and lucid waters, with a touch of human occupancy here andthere--all this, set in that enormous granite frame, three or fourthousand feet high, ornamented with domes and spires and peaks stillhigher, --it is all this that wins your heart and fills yourimagination in the Yosemite. 

As you ride or walk along the winding road up the level valley amidthe noble pines and spruces and oaks, and past the groves and bitsof meadow and the camps of many tents, and the huge mossy graniteboulders here and there reposing in the shade of the trees, with thefull, clear, silent river winding through the plain near you, youare all the time aware of those huge vertical walls, their facesscarred and niched, streaked with color, or glistening withmoisture, and animated with waterfalls, rising up on either hand, thousands of feet high, not architectural, or like somethingbuilded, but like the sides and the four corners of the globeitself. What an impression of mass and of power and of grandeur inrepose filters into you as you walk along! El Capitan stands thereshowing its simple sweeping lines through the trees as you approach, like one of the veritable pillars of the firmament. How long we arenearing it and passing it! It is so colossal that it seems nearwhile it is yet far off. It is so simple that the eye takes in itsnaked grandeur at a glance. It demands of you a new standard of sizewhich you cannot at once produce. It is as clean and smooth as theflank of a horse, and as poised and calm as a Greek statue. Itcurves out toward the base as if planted there to resist thepressure of worlds--probably the most majestic single granitecolumn or mountain buttress on the earth. Its summit is over threethousand feet above you. Across the valley, nearly opposite, risethe Cathedral Rocks to nearly the same height, while farther along, beyond El Capitan, the Three Brothers shoulder the sky at about thesame dizzy height. Near the head of the great valley, North Dome, perfect in outline as if turned in a lathe, and its brother, theHalf Dome (or shall we say half-brother?) across the valley, lookdown upon Mirror Lake from an altitude of over four thousand feet. These domes suggest enormous granite bubbles if such were possiblepushed up from below and retaining their forms through the vastgeologic ages. Of course they must have weathered enormously, but asthe rock seems to peel off in concentric sheets, their forms arepreserved. 

II

One warm, bright Sunday near the end of April, six of us walked upfrom the hotel to Vernal and Nevada Falls, or as near to them as wecould get, and took our fill of the tumult of foaming watersstruggling with the wreck of huge granite cliffs: so impassive andimmobile the rocks, so impetuous and reckless and determined theonset of the waters, till the falls are reached, when the obstructedriver seems to find the escape and the freedom it was so eagerlyseeking. Better to be completely changed into foam and spray by onesingle leap of six hundred feet into empty space, the river seems tosay, than be forever baffled and tortured and torn on this rack ofmerciless boulders. 

We followed the zigzagging trail up the steep side of the valley, touching melting snow-banks in its upper courses, passing hugegranite rocks also melting in the slow heat of the geologic ages, pausing to take in the rugged, shaggy spruces and pines thatsentineled the mountain-sides here and there, or resting our eyesupon Liberty Cap, which carries its suggestive form a thousand feetor more above the Nevada Fall. What beauty, what grandeur attendedus that day! the wild tumult of waters, the snow-white falls, themotionless avalanches of granite rocks, and the naked granite shaft, Liberty Cap, dominating all!

And that night, too, when we sat around a big camp-fire near ourtents in the valley, and saw the full moon come up and look downupon us from behind Sentinel Rock, and heard the intermittentbooming of Yosemite Falls sifting through the spruce trees thattowered around us, and felt the tender, brooding spirit of the greatvalley, itself touched to lyric intensity by the grandeurs on everyhand, steal in upon us, and possess our souls--surely that was anight none of us can ever forget. As Yosemite can stand the broad, searching light of midday and not be cheapened, so its enchantmentscan stand the light of the moon and the stars and not be renderedtoo vague and impalpable. 

III

Going from the Grand Canon to Yosemite is going from one sublimityto another of a different order. The canon is the more strange, unearthly, apocryphal, appeals more to the imagination, and is themore overwhelming in its size, its wealth of color, and itsmultitude of suggestive forms. But for quiet majesty and beauty, with a touch of the sylvan and pastoral, too, Yosemite stands alone. One could live with Yosemite, camp in it, tramp in it, winter andsummer in it, and find nature in her tender and human, almostdomestic moods, as well as in her grand and austere. But I do notthink one could ever feel at home in or near the Grand Canon; it istoo unlike anything we have ever known upon the earth; it is like avision of some strange colossal city uncovered from the depth ofgeologic time. You may have come to it, as we did, from thePetrified Forests, where you saw the silicified trunks of thousandsof gigantic trees or tree ferns, that grew millions of years ago, most of them uncovered, but many of them protruding from banks ofclay and gravel, and in their interiors rich in all the colors ofthe rainbow, and you wonder if you may not now be gazing upon somepetrified antediluvian city of temples and holy places exhumed bymysterious hands and opened up to the vulgar gaze of to-day. Youlook into it from above and from another world and you descend intoit at your peril. Yosemite you enter as into a gigantic hall andmake your own; the canon you gaze down upon, and are an alien, whether you enter it or not. Yosemite is carved out of the mostmajestic and enduring of all rocks, granite; the Grand Canon iscarved out of one of the most beautiful, but perishable, redCarboniferous sandstone and limestone. There is a maze of beautifuland intricate lines in the latter, a wilderness of temple-like formsand monumental remains, and noble architectural profiles thatdelight while they bewilder the eye. Yosemite has much greatersimplicity, and is much nearer the classic standard of beauty. Itsgrand and austere features predominate, of course, but underneaththese and adorning them are many touches of the idyllic and thepicturesque. Its many waterfalls fluttering like white lace againstits vertical granite walls, its smooth, level floor, its noble pinesand oaks, its open glades, its sheltering groves, its bright, clear, winding river, its soft voice of many waters, its flowers, itsbirds, its grass, its verdure, even its orchards of blooming appletrees, all inclosed in this tremendous granite frame--what anunforgettable picture it all makes, what a blending of the sublimeand the homelike and familiar it all is! It is the waterfalls thatmake the granite alive, and bursting into bloom as it were. What atouch they give! how they enliven the scene! What music they evokefrom these harps of stone!

The first leap of Yosemite Falls is sixteen hundred feet--sixteenhundred feet of a compact mass of snowy rockets shooting downwardand bursting into spray around which rainbows flit and hover. Thenext leap is four hundred feet, and the last six hundred. We triedto get near the foot and inspect the hidden recess in which thisairy spirit again took on a more tangible form of still, runningwater, but the spray over a large area fell like a summer shower, drenching the trees and the rocks, and holding the inquisitivetourist off at a safe distance. We had to beat a retreat withdripping garments before we had got within fifty yards of the footof the fall. At first I was surprised at the volume of water thatcame hurrying out of the hidden recess of dripping rocks andtrees--a swiftly flowing stream, thirty or forty feet wide, and fouror five feet deep. How could that comparatively narrow curtain ofwhite spray up there give birth to such a full robust stream? But Isaw that in making the tremendous leap from the top of theprecipice, the stream was suddenly drawn out, as we stretch a rubberband in our hands, and that the solid and massive current below waslike the rubber again relaxed. The strain was over, and the unitedwaters deepened and slowed up over their rocky bed. 

Yosemite for a home or a camp, the Grand Canon for a spectacle. Ihave spoken of the robin I saw in Yosemite Valley. Think how forlornand out of place a robin would seem in the Grand Canon! What wouldhe do there? There is no turf for him to inspect, and there are notrees for him to perch on. I should as soon expect to find him amidthe pyramids of Egypt, or amid the ruins of Karnak. The bluebird wasin the Yosemite also, and the water-ouzel haunted the lucid waters. 

I noticed a peculiarity of the oak in Yosemite that I never sawelsewhere [Footnote: I have since observed the same trait in theoaks in Georgia--probably a characteristic of this tree in southernlatitudes. ]--a fluid or outflowing condition of the growthaboveground, such as one usually sees in the roots of trees--so thatit tended to envelop and swallow, as it were, any solid object withwhich it came in contact. If its trunk touched a point of rock, itwould put out great oaken lips several inches in extent as if todraw the rock into its maw. If a dry limb was cut or broken off, afoot from the trunk, these thin oaken lips would slowly creep outand envelop it--a sort of Western omnivorous trait appearing in thetrees. 

Whitman refers to "the slumbering and liquid trees. " These Yosemiteoaks recall his expression more surely than any of our Easterntrees. 

The reader may create for himself a good image of Yosemite bythinking of a section of seven or eight miles of the Hudson River, midway of its course, as emptied of its water and deepened threethousand feet or more, having the sides nearly vertical, withsnow-white waterfalls fluttering against them here and there, thefamous spires and domes planted along the rim, and the landscape ofgroves and glades, with its still, clear winding river, occupyingthe bottom. 

IV

One cannot look upon Yosemite or walk beneath its towering wallswithout the question arising in his mind, How did all this happen?What were the agents that brought it about? There has been a greatgeologic drama enacted here; who or what were the star actors? Thereare two other valleys in this part of the Sierra, Hetch-Hetchy andKing's River, that are almost identical in their main features, though the Merced Yosemite is the widest of the three. Each of themis a tremendous chasm in the granite rock, with nearly verticalwalls, domes, El Capitans, and Sentinel and Cathedral Rocks, andwaterfalls--all modeled on the same general plan. I believe thereis nothing just like this trio of Yosemites anywhere else on theglobe. 

Guided by one's ordinary sense or judgment alone, one's judgment asdeveloped and disciplined by the everyday affairs of life and theeveryday course of nature, one would say on beholding Yosemite thathere is the work of exceptional and extraordinary agents orworld-building forces. It is as surprising and exceptional as wouldbe a cathedral in a village street, or a gigantic sequoia in a groveof our balsam firs. The approach to it up the Merced River does notprepare one for any such astonishing spectacle as awaits one. Therushing, foaming water amid the tumbled confusion of huge graniterocks and the open V-shaped valley, are nothing very remarkable orunusual. Then suddenly you are on the threshold of this hall of theelder gods. Demons and furies might lurk in the valley below, buthere is the abode of the serene, beneficent Olympian deities. All isso calm, so hushed, so friendly, yet so towering, so stupendous, sounspeakably beautiful. You are in a mansion carved out of thegranite foundations of the earth, with walls two or three thousandfeet high, hung here and there with snow-white waterfalls, andsupporting the blue sky on domes and pinnacles still higher. Oh, thecalmness and majesty of the scene! the evidence of such tremendousactivity of some force, some agent, and now so tranquil, sosheltering, so beneficent!

That there should be two or three Yosemites in the Sierra not veryfar apart, all with the main features singularly alike, is verysignificant--as if this kind of valley was latent in the granite ofthat region--some peculiarity of rock structure that lends itselfreadily to these formations. The Sierra lies beyond the southernlimit of the great continental ice-sheet of late Tertiary times, butit nursed and reared many local glaciers, and to the eroding powerof these its Yosemites are partly due. But water was at work herelong before the ice--eating down into the granite and laying openthe mountain for the ice to begin its work. Ice may come, and icemay go, says the river, but I go on forever. Water tends to make aV-shaped valley, ice a U-shaped one, though in the Hawaiian Islands, where water erosion alone has taken place, the prevailing form ofthe valleys is that of the U-shaped. Yosemite approximates to thisshape, and ice has certainly played a part in its formation. But theglacier seems to have stopped at the outlet of the great valley; itdid not travel beyond the gigantic hall it had helped to excavate. The valley of the Merced from the mouth of Yosemite downward is anopen valley strewn with huge angular granite rocks and shows nosigns of glaciation whatever. The reason of this abruptness is quitebeyond my ken. It is to me a plausible theory that when the granitethat forms the Sierra was lifted or squeezed up by the shrinking ofthe earth, large fissures and crevasses may have occurred, and thatYosemite and kindred valleys may be the result of the action ofwater and ice in enlarging these original chasms. Little wonder thatthe earlier geologists, such as Whitney, were led to attribute theexceptional character of these valleys to exceptional andextraordinary agents--to sudden faulting or dislocation of theearth's crust. But geologists are becoming more and more loath tocall in the cataclysmal to explain any feature of the topography ofthe land. Not to the thunder or the lightning, to earthquake orvolcano, to the forces of upheaval or dislocation, but to the still, small voice of the rain and the winds, of the frost and thesnow, --the gentle forces now and here active all about us, carvingthe valleys and reducing the mountains, and changing the courses ofrivers, --to these, as Lyell taught us, we are to look in nine casesout of ten, yes, in ninety-nine out of a hundred, to account for theconfiguration of the continents. 

The geologists of our day, while not agreeing as to the amount ofwork done respectively by ice and water, yet agree that to thelatter the larger proportion of the excavation is to be ascribed. Atany rate between them both they have turned out one of the mostbeautiful and stupendous pieces of mountain carving to be found uponthe earth. 

IV

THROUGH THE EYES OF THE GEOLOGIST

I

How habitually we go about over the surface of the earth, delving itor cultivating it or leveling it, without thinking that it has notalways been as we now find it, that the mountains were not alwaysmountains, nor the valleys always valleys, nor the plains alwaysplains, nor the sand always sand, nor the clay always clay. Ourexperience goes but a little way in such matters. Such a thoughttakes us from human time to God's time, from the horizon of placeand years to the horizon of geologic ages. We go about our littleaffairs in the world, sowing and reaping and building andjourneying, like children playing through the halls of theirancestors, without pausing to ask how these things all came about. We do not reflect upon the age of our fields any more than we doupon the size of the globe under our feet: when we become curiousabout such matters and look upon the mountains as either old oryoung, or as the subjects of birth, growth, and decay, then we areunconscious geologists. It is to our interest in such things thatgeology appeals and it is this interest that it stimulates andguides. 

What an astonishing revelation, for instance, that the soil was bornof the rocks, and is still born of the rocks; that every particle ofit was once locked up in the primitive granite and was unlocked bythe slow action of the rain and the dews and the snows; that therocky ribs of the earth were clothed with this fertile soil out ofwhich we came and to which we return by their own decay; that thepulling-down of the inorganic meant the building-up of the organic;that the death of the crystal meant the birth of the cell, andindirectly 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 noyou and me. Such considerations have long made me feel a keeninterest in geology, and especially of late years have stimulated mydesire to try to see the earth as the geologist sees it. I havealways had a good opinion of the ground underfoot, out of which weall come, and to which we all return; and the story the geologiststell us about it is calculated to enhance greatly that good opinion. 

I think that if I could be persuaded, as my fathers were, that theworld was made in six days, by the fiat of a supernatural power, Ishould soon lose my interest in it. Such an account of it takes itout of the realm of human interest, because it takes it out of therealm of natural causation, and places it in the realm of thearbitrary, 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 evolutionas much as the life upon the surface, that it has an almost infinitepast, that it has been developing and ripening for millions uponmillions 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 init. 

As with nearly everything else, the wonder of the world grows themore we grasp its history. The wonder of life grows the more weconsider the chaos of fire and death out of which it came; thewonder of man grows the more we peer into the abyss of geologic timeand of low bestial life out of which he came. 

Not a tree, not a shrub, not a flower, not a green thing growing, not an insect of an hour, but has a background of a vast aeon ofgeologic and astronomic time, out of which the forces that shaped ithave emerged, and over which the powers of chaos and darkness havefailed to prevail. 

The modern geologist affords us one of the best illustrations of theuses of the scientific imagination that we can turn to. Thescientific imagination seems to be about the latest phase of theevolution of the human mind. This power of interpretation ofconcrete facts, this Miltonic flight into time and space, into theheavens above, and into the bowels of the earth beneath, and bodyingforth a veritable history, a warring of the powers of light anddarkness, with the triumph of the angels of light and life, makesMilton's picture seem hollow and unreal. The creative and poeticimagination has undoubtedly already reached its high-water mark. Weshall probably never see the great imaginative works of the pastsurpassed or even equaled. But in the world of scientific discoveryand interpretation, we see the imagination working in new fields andunder new conditions, and achieving triumphs that mark a new epochin the history of the race. Nature, which once terrified man andmade a coward of him, now inspires him and fills him with love andenthusiasm. 

The geologist is the interpreter of the records of the rocks. From abit of strata here, and a bit there, he re-creates the earth as itwas in successive geologic periods, as Cuvier reconstructed hisextinct animals from fragments of their bones; and the sameinterpretative power of the imagination is called into play in bothcases, only the palaeontologist has a much narrower field to workin, and the background of his re-creations must be supplied by thegeologist. 

Everything connected with the history of the earth is on such a vastscale--such a scale of time, such a scale of power, such a scale ofmovement--that in trying to measure it by our human standards andexperience we are like the proverbial child with his cup on theseashore. Looked at from our point of view, the great geologicalprocesses often seem engaged in world-destruction rather than inworld-building. Those oft-repeated invasions of the continents bythe ocean, which have gone on from Archaean times, and during whichvast areas which had been dry land for ages were engulfed, seem likeworld-wide catastrophes. And no doubt they were such to myriads ofplants and animals of those times. But this is the way thecontinents grew. All the forces of the invading waters were engagedin making more land. 

The geologist is bold; he is made so by the facts and processes withwhich he deals; his daring affirmations are inspired by a study ofthe features of the earth about him; his time is not our time, hishorizons are not our horizons; he escapes from our human experiencesand standards into the vast out-of-doors of the geologic forces andgeologic ages. The text he deciphers is written large, writtenacross the face of the continent, written in mountain-chains andocean depths, and in the piled strata of the globe. We untrainedobservers cannot spell out these texts, because they are writtenlarge; our vision is adjusted to smaller print; we are like theschool-boy who finds on the map the name of a town or a river, butdoes not see the name of the state or the continent printed acrossit. If the geologist did not tell us, how should we ever suspectthat probably where we now stand two or more miles of strata havebeen worn away by the winds and rains; that the soil of our garden, our farm, represents the ashes of mountains burned up in the slowfires of the geologic ages. 

Geology first gives us an adequate conception of time. Thelimitations which shut our fathers into the narrow close of sixthousand years are taken down by this great science and we areturned out into the open of unnumbered millions of years. Upon thebackground of geologic time our chronological time shows no morethan a speck upon the sky. The whole of human history is but a merefraction of a degree of this mighty arc. The Christian era wouldmake but a few seconds of the vast cycle of the earth's history. Geologic time! The words seem to ring down through the rocky strataof the earth's crust; they reverberate under the mountains, and makethem rise and fall like the waves of the sea; they open up vistasthrough which we behold the continents and the oceans changingplaces, and the climates of the globe shifting like clouds in thesky; whole races and tribes of animal forms disappear and new onescome upon the scene. Such a past! the imagination can barely skirtthe edge of it. As the pool in the field is to the sea that wrapsthe earth, so is the time of our histories to the cycle of ages inwhich the geologist reckons the events of the earth's history. 

Through the eyes of the geologist one may look upon his native hillsand see them as they were incalculable ages ago, and as theyprobably will be incalculable ages ahead; those hills, so unchangingduring his lifetime, and during a thousand lifetimes, he may see asflitting as the cloud shadows upon the landscape. Out of the darkabyss of geologic time there come stalking the ghosts of lostmountains and lost hills and valleys and plains, or lost rivers andlakes, yea, of lost continents; we see a procession of the phantomsof strange and monstrous beasts, many of them colossal in size andfearful in form, and among the minor forms of this fearful troop ofspectres we see the ones that carried safely forward, through thevicissitudes of those ages, the precious impulse that was toeventuate in the human race. 

Only the geologist knows the part played by erosion in shaping theearth's surface as we see it. He sees, I repeat, the phantoms ofvanished hills and mountains all about us. He sees their shadowforms wherever he looks. He follows out the lines of the flexed orfolded strata where they come to the surface, and thus sketches inthe air the elevation that has disappeared. In some places he findsthat the valleys have become hills and the hills have becomevalleys, or that the anticlines and synclines, as he calls them, have changed places--as a result of the unequal hardness of therocks. Over all the older parts of the country the original featureshave been so changed by erosion that, could they be suddenlyrestored, one would be lost on his home farm. The rocks have meltedinto soil, as the snow-banks in spring melt into water. The rocksthat remain are like fragments of snow or ice that have so farwithstood the weather. Geologists tell us that the great Appalachianchain has been in the course of the ages reduced almost to a baselevel or peneplain, and then reelevated and its hills and mountainscarved 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 amountain, but what are these compared with the changes that havegone on there before our race was heard of? In my native mountains, the Catskills, all those peaceful pastoral valleys, with their farmsand homesteads, lie two or three thousand feet below the originalsurface of the land. Could the land be restored again to its firstcondition in Devonian times, probably the fields where I hoed cornand potatoes as a boy would be buried one or two miles beneath therocks. 

The Catskills are residual mountains, or what Agassiz calls"denudation mountains. " When we look at them with the eye of thegeologist we see the great plateau of tableland of Devonian timesout of which they were carved by the slow action of the sub-aerialforces. They are like the little ridges and mounds of soil thatremain of your garden-patch after the waters of a cloudburst haveswept over it. They are immeasurably old, but they do not look it, except to the eye of the geologist. There is nothing decrepit intheir appearance, nothing broken, or angular, or gaunt, or rawboned. Their long, easy, flowing lines, their broad, smooth backs, theirdeep, wide, gently sloping valleys, all help to give them a look ofrepose and serenity, as if the fret and fever of life were longsince passed with them. Compared with the newer mountains of upliftin the West, they are like cattle lying down and ruminating in thefield beside alert wild steers with rigid limbs and tossing horns. They sleep and dream with bowed heads upon the landscape. Theirgreat flanks and backs are covered with a deep soil that nourishes avery even growth of beech, birch, and maple forests. Though so old, their tranquillity never seems to have been disturbed; nostorm-and-stress period has left its mark upon them. Their strataall lie horizontal just as they were laid down in the old seas, andnothing but the slow gentle passage of the hand of time shows intheir contours. Mountains of peace and repose, hills and valleyswith the flowing lines of youth, coming down to us from the fore-world of Palaeozoic time, yet only rounded and mellowed by the aeonsthey have passed through. Old, oh, so old, but young with verdureand limpid streams, and the pastoral spirit of to-day!

To the geologist most mountains are short-lived. When he finds greatsturdy ranges, like the Alps, the Andes, the Himalayas, he knowsthey are young, --mere boys. When they get old, they will be cutdown, and their pride and glory gone. A few more of these geologicyears and they will be reduced to a peneplain, --only their stumpsleft. This seems to hold truer of mountains that are wrinkles in theearth's crust--squeezed up and crumpled stratified rock, such asmost of the great mountain-systems are--than of mountains oferosion like the Catskills, or of upheaval like the Adirondacks. Thecrushed and folded and dislocated strata are laid open to theweather as the horizontal strata, and as the upheaved masses ofArchaean rock are not. Moreover, strata of unequal hardness areexposed, and this condition favors rapid erosion. 

In imagination the geologist is present at the birth of wholemountain-ranges. He sees them gestating in the womb of their mother, the sea. Where our great Appalachian range now stands, he sees, inthe great interior sea of Palaeozoic time, what he calls a"geosyncline, " a vast trough, or cradle, being slowly filled withsediment brought down by the rivers from the adjoining shores. Thesesediments accumulate to the enormous depth of twenty-five thousandfeet, and harden into rock. Then in the course of time they aresqueezed together and forced up by the contraction of the earth'scrust, and thus the Appalachians are born. When Mother Earth takes anew hitch in her belt, her rocky garment takes on new wrinkles. Justwhy the earth's crust should wrinkle along lines of rock of suchenormous thickness is not a little puzzling. But we are told it isbecause this heavy mass of sediment presses the sea-bottom down tillthe rocks are fused by the internal heat of the earth and thus aline of weakness is established. In any case the earth's forces actas a whole, and the earth's crust at the thickest points is socomparatively thin--probably not much more than a heavy sheet ofcardboard over a six-inch globe--that these forces seem to go theirown way regardless of such minor differences. 

The Alps and the Himalayas, much younger than our Appalachians, werealso begotten and nursed in the cradle of a vast geosyncline in theTertiary seas. We speak of the birth of a mountain-range in terms ofa common human occurrence, or as if it were an event that might bewitnessed, measurable in human years or days, whereas it is an eventmeasurable only in geologic periods, and geologic periods are markedoff only on the dial-face of eternity. The old Hebrew writer gavebut a faint image of it when he said that with the Lord a thousandyears are as one day; it is hardly one hour of the slow beat of thatclock whose hours mark the periods of the earth's development. 

The whole long period during which the race of man has been rushingabout, tickling and scratching and gashing the surface of the globe, would make but a small fraction of one of the days that make up theperiods with which the geologist deals. And the span of human life, how it dwindles to a point in the face of the records of the rocks!Doubtless the birth of some of the mountain-systems of the globe isstill going on, and we suspect it not; an elevation of one foot in acentury would lift up the Sierra or the Rocky Mountains in acomparatively short geologic period. 

II

It was the geologist that emboldened Tennyson to sing, --

 "The hills are shadows and they flow From form to form and nothing stands, They melt like mists, the solid lands, Like clouds they shape themselves and go. "

But some hills flow much faster than others. Hills made up of thelatest or newest formations seem to take to themselves wings thefastest. 

The Archaean hills and mountains, how slowly they melt away! In theAdirondacks, in northern New England, in the Highlands of theHudson, they still hold their heads high and have something of thevigor of their prime. 

The most enduring rocks are the oldest; and the most perishable are, as a rule, the youngest. It takes time to season and harden therocks, as it does men. Then the earlier rocks seem to have hadbetter stuff in them. They are nearer the paternal granite; and theprimordial seas that mothered them were, no doubt, richer in thevarious mineral solutions that knitted and compacted the sedimentarydeposits. The Cretaceous formations melt away almost like snow. Ifancy that the ocean now, compared with the earlier condition whenit must have been so saturated with mineral elements, is likethrice-skimmed milk. 

The geologist is not stinted for time. He deals with big figures. Itis refreshing to see him dealing out his years so liberally. Do youwant a million or two to account for this or that? You shall have itfor the asking. He has an enormous balance in the bank of Time, andhe draws upon it to suit his purpose. In human history a thousandyears is a long time. Ten thousand years wipe out human historycompletely. Ten thousand more, and we are probably among the rudecave-men or river-drift men. One hundred thousand, and weare--where? Probably among the simian ancestors of man. A millionyears, and we are probably in Eocene or Miocene times, among thehuge and often grotesque mammals, and our ancestor, a littlecreature, probably of the marsupial kind, is skulking about andhiding from the great carnivorous beasts that would devour him. 

 "Little man, least of all, Among the legs of his guardians tall, Walked about with puzzled look. Him by the hand dear Nature took, Dearest Nature, strong and kind, Whispered, 'Darling, never mind! To-morrow they will wear another face, The founder thou; these are thy race!'"

I fancy Emerson would be surprised and probably displeased at theuse I have made of his lines. I remember once hearing him say thathis teacher in such matters as I am here touching upon was Agassiz, and not Darwin. Yet did he not write that audacious line about "theworm striving to be man"? And Nature certainly took his "little man"by the hand and led him forward, and on the morrow the rest of theanimal creation "wore another face. "

III

In my geological studies I have had a good deal of trouble with thesedimentary rocks, trying to trace their genealogy and getting themproperly fathered and mothered. I do not think the geologists fullyappreciate what a difficult problem the origin of these rockspresents to the lay mind. They bulk so large, while the mass oforiginal crystalline rocks from which they are supposed to have beenderived is so small in comparison. In the case of our own continentwe have, to begin with, about two million of square miles ofArchaean rocks in detached lines and masses, rising here and thereabove the primordial ocean; a large triangular mass in Canada, andtwo broken lines of smaller masses running south from it on eachside of the continent, inclosing a vast interior sea between them. To end with, we have the finished continent of eight million or moresquare miles, of an average height of two thousand feet above thesea, built up or developed from and around these granite centresvery much as the body is built up and around the bones, and of suchprodigious weight that some of our later geologists seek to accountfor the continental submarine shelf that surrounds the continent onthe theory that the land has slowly crept out into the sea under thepressure of its own weight. And all this, --to say nothing of thevast amount of rock, in some places a mile or two in thickness, thathas been eroded from the land surfaces of the globe in latergeological time, and now lies buried in the seas and lakes, --we aretold, is the contribution of those detached portions of Archaeanrock that first rose above the primordial seas. It is a greatermiracle than that of the loaves and the fishes. We have vastly moreto end with than we had to begin with. The more the rocks have beendestroyed, the more they have increased; the more the waters havedevoured them, the more they have multiplied and waxed strong. 

Either the geologists have greatly underestimated the amount ofArchaean rock above the waters at the start, or else there arefactors in the problem that have not been taken into the account. Lyell seems to have appreciated the difficulties of the problem, and, to account for the forty thousand feet of sediment deposited inPalaeozoic times in the region of the Appalachians, he presupposes aneighboring continent to the east, probably formed of Laurentianrocks, where now rolls the Atlantic. But if such a continent onceexisted, would not some vestige of it still remain? The fact that notrace of it as been found, it seems to me, invalidates Lyell'stheory. 

Archaean time in geologic history answers to pre-historic time inhuman history; all is dark and uncertain, though we are probablysafe in assuming that there was more strife and turmoil among theearth-building forces than there has ever been since. The body ofunstratified rock within the limits of North America may have beenmuch greater than is supposed, but it seems to me impossible that itcould have been anything like as massive as the continent now is. Ifthis had been the case there would have been no great interior sea, and no wide sea-margins in which the sediments of the stratifiedrocks could have been deposited. More than four fifths of thecontinent is of secondary origin and shows that vast geologic eraswent to the making of it. 

It is equally hard to believe that the primary or igneous rocks, where they did appear, were sufficiently elevated to have furnishedthrough erosion the all but incalculable amount of material thatwent to the making of our vast land areas. But the geologists giveme the impression that this is what we are to believe. 

Chamberlin and Salisbury, in their recent college geology, teachthat each new formation implies the destruction of an equivalentamount of older rock--every system being entirely built up out ofthe older one beneath it. Lyell and Dana teach the same thing. Ifthis were true, could there have been any continental growth at all?Could a city grow by the process of pulling down the old buildingsfor material to build the new? If the geology is correct, I fail tosee how there would be any more land surface to-day then there wasin Archaean times. Each new formation would only have replaced theold from which it came. The Silurian would only have made good thewaste of the Cambrian, and the Devonian made good the waste of theSilurian, and so on to the top of the series, and in the end weshould still have been at the foot of the stairs. That vast interiorsea that in Archaean times stretched from the rudimentaryAppalachian Mountains to the rudimentary Rocky Mountains, and whichis now the heart of the continent, would still have been a part ofthe primordial ocean. But instead of that, this sea is filled andpiled up with sedimentary rocks thousands of feet thick, that havegiven birth on their surfaces to thousands of square miles of asfertile soil as the earth holds. 

That the original crystalline rocks played the major part in thegenealogy of the subsequent stratified rocks, it would be folly todeny. But it seems to me that chemical and cosmic processes, workingthrough the air and the water, have contributed more than they havebeen credited with. 

It looks as if in all cases when the soil is carried to theseabottom as sediment, and again, during the course of ages, consolidated into rocks, the rocks thus formed have exceeded in bulkthe rocks that gave them birth. Something analogous to vital growthtakes place. It seems as if the original granite centres set theworld-building forces at work. They served as nuclei around whichthe materials gathered. These rocks bred other rocks, and thesestill others, and yet others, till the framework of the land wasfairly established. They were like the pioneer settlers who planthomes here and there in the wilderness, and then in due time all theland is peopled. 

The granite is the Adam rock, and through a long line of descent themajor part of all the other rocks directly or indirectly may betraced. Thus the granite begot the Algonquin, the Algonquin begotthe Cambrian, the Cambrian begot the Silurian, the Silurian begotthe Devonian, and so on up through the Carboniferous, the Permian, the Mesozoic rocks, the Tertiary rocks, to the latest Quaternarydeposit. 

But the curious thing about it all is the enormous progeny from sosmall a beginning; the rocks seem really to have grown andmultiplied like organic beings; the seed of the granite seems tohave fertilized the whole world of waters, and in due time theybrought forth this huge family of stratified rocks. There stands theArchaean Adam, his head and chest in Canada, his two unequal legsrunning, one down the Pacific coast, and one down the AtlanticCoast, and from his loins, we are told, all the progeny of rocks andsoils that make up the continent have sprung, one generationsucceeding another in regular order. His latest offspring is in theSouth and Southwest, and in the interior. These are the newcountries, geologically speaking, as well as humanly speaking. 

The great interior sea, epicontinental, the geologists call it, seems to have been fermenting and laboring for untold aeons inbuilding up these parts of the continent. In the older EasternStates we find the sons and grandsons of the old Adam granite; butin the South and West we find his offspring of the twentieth ortwenty-fifth generation, and so unlike their forebears; the Permianrocks, for instance, and the Cretaceous rocks, are soft andunenduring, for the most part. The later slates, too, aredegenerates, and much of the sandstones have the hearts ofprodigals. In the Bad Lands of Arizona I could have cut my way intosome of the Eocene formations with my pocket-knife. Apparently thefarther away we get from the parent granite, the more easily is therock eroded. Nearly all the wonderful and beautiful sculpturing ofthe rocks in the West and Southwest is in rocks of comparativelyrecent date. 

Can we say that all the organic matter of our time is frompreexisting organic matter? one organism torn down to build upanother? that the beginning of the series was as great as the end?There may have been as much matter in a state of vital organizationin Carboniferous or in Cretaceous times as in our own, but there iscertainly more now than in early Palaeozoic times. Yet every grainof this matter has existed somewhere in some form for all time. Orwe might ask if all the wealth of our day is from preexistingwealth--one fortune pulled down to build up another, --too often thecase, it is true, --thus passing the accumulated wealth along fromone generation to another. On the contrary, has there not been asteady gain of that we call wealth through the ingenuity and theindustry of man directed towards the latent wealth of the earth? Ina parallel manner has there been a gain in the bulk of the secondaryrocks through the action of the world-building forces directed tothe sea, the air, and the preexisting rocks. Had there been no gain, the fact would suggest the ill luck of a man investing his capitalin business and turning it over and over, and having no more moneyat the end than he had in the beginning. 

Nothing is in the sedimentary rock that was not at one time in theoriginal granite, or in the primordial seas, or in the primordialatmosphere, or in the heavens above, or in the interior of the earthbeneath. We must sweep the heavens, strain the seas, and leach theair, to obtain all this material. Evidently the growth of theserocks has been mainly a chemical process--a chemical organization ofpreexisting material, as much so as the growth of a plant or a treeor an animal. The color and texture and volume of each formationdiffer so radically from those of the one immediately before it asto suggest something more than a mere mechanical derivation of onefrom the other. New factors, new sources, are implied. "The fartherwe recede from the present time, " says Lyell, "and the higher theantiquity of the formations which we examine, the greater are thechanges which the sedimentary deposits have undergone. " Above allhave chemical processes produced changes. This constant passage ofthe mineral elements of the rocks through the cycle of erosion, sedimentation, and reinduration has exposed them to the action ofthe air, the light, the sea, and has thus undoubtedly brought abouta steady growth in their volume and a constant change in their colorand texture. Marl and clay and green sand and salt and gypsum andshale, all have their genesis, all came down to us in some way or insome degree, from the aboriginal crystalline rocks; but whattransformations and transmutations they have undergone! They havepassed through Nature's laboratory and taken on new forms andcharacteristics. 

"All sediments deposited in the sea, " says my geology, "undergo moreor less chemical change, " and many chemical changes involve notablechanges in volume of the mineral matter concerned. It has beenestimated that the conversion of granite rock into soil increasesits volume eighty-eight per cent, largely as the result ofhydration, or the taking up of water in the chemical union. Theprocesses of oxidation and carbonation are also expansive processes. Whether any of this gain in volume is lost in the process ofsedimentation and reconsolidation, I do not know. Probably all theelements that water takes from the rocks by solution, it returns tothem when the disintegrated parts, in the form of sediment in thesea, is again converted into strata. It is in this cycle of rockdisintegration and rock re-formation that the processes of life goon. Without the decay of the rock there could be no life on theland. Water and air are always the go-betweens of the organic andinorganic. After the rains have depleted the rocks of their solubleparts and carried them to the sea, they come back and aid vegetablelife to unlock and appropriate other soluble parts, and thus buildup the vegetable and, indirectly, the animal world. 

That the growth of the continents owes much to the denudation of thesea-bottom, brought about by the tides and the ocean-currents, whichwere probably much more powerful in early than in late geologictimes, and to submarine mineral springs and volcanic eruptions ofashes and mud, admits of little doubt. That it owes much toextra-terrestrial sources--to meteorites and meteoric dust--alsoadmits of little doubt. 

It seems reasonable that earlier in the history of the evolution ofour solar system there should have been much more meteoric matterdrifting through the interplanetary spaces than during the laterages, and that a large amount of this matter should have found itsway to the earth, in the form either of solids or of gases. Probablymuch more material has been contributed by volcanic eruptions thanthere is any evidence of apparent. The amount of mineral matter heldin solution by the primordial seas must have been enormous. Theamount of rock laid down in Palaeozoic times is estimated at fiftythousand feet, and of this thirteen thousand feet were limestone;while the amount laid down in Mesozoic times, for aught we know aperiod quite as long, amounts to eight thousand feet, indicating, itseems to me, that the deposition of sediment went on much morerapidly in early geologic times. We are nearer the beginning ofthings. All chemical processes in the earth's crust were probablymore rapid. Doubtless the rainfall was more, but the land areas musthave been less. The greater amount of carbon dioxide in the airduring Palaeozoic times would have favored more rapid carbonation. When granite is dissolved by weathering, carbon unites with thepotash, the soda, the lime, the magnesia, and the iron, and turnsthem into carbonates and swells their bulk. The one thing that ispassed along from formation to formation unchanged is the quartzsand. Quartz is tough, and the sand we find to-day is practicallythe same that was dissolved out of the first crystalline rocks. 

Take out of the soil and out of the rocks all that they owe to theair, --the oxygen and the carbon, --and how would they dwindle! Thelimestone rocks would practically disappear. 

Probably not less that one fourth of all the sedimentary rocks arelimestone, which is of animal origin. How much of the lime of whichthese rocks were built was leached out of the land-areas, and howmuch was held in solution by the original sea-water, is of course aquestion. But all the carbon they hold came out of the air. Thewaters of the primordial ocean were probably highly charged withmineral matter, with various chlorides and sulphates and carbonates, such as the sulphate of soda, the sulphate of lime, the sulphate ofmagnesia, the chloride of sodium, and the like. The chloride ofsodium, or salt, remains, while most of the other compounds havebeen precipitated through the agency of minute forms of life, andnow form parts of the soil and of the stratified rocks beneath it. 

If the original granite is the father of the rocks, the sea is themother. In her womb they were gestated and formed. Had not thisseesaw of land and ocean taken place, there could have been nocontinental growth. Every time the land took a bath in the sea, itcame up enriched and augmented. Each new layer of rocky strata takenon showed a marked change in color and texture. It was a kind ofevolution from that which preceded it. Whether the land always wentdown, or whether the sea at times came up, by reason of somedisturbance of the ocean floors in its abysmal depths, we have nomeans of knowing. In any case, most of the land has taken a sea bathmany times, not all taking the plunge at the same time, butdifferent parts going down in successive geologic ages. The originalgranite upheavals in British America, and in New York and NewEngland, seem never to have taken this plunge, except an area aboutLake Superior which geologists say has gone down four or five times. The Laurentian and Adirondack ranges have never been in pickle inthe sea since they first saw the light. In most other parts of thecontinent, the seesaw between the sea and the land has gone onsteadily from the first, and has been the chief means of theupbuilding of the land. 

To the slow and oft-repeated labor-throes of the sea we owe thecontinents. But the sea devours her children. Large areas, probablycontinental in extent, have gone down and have not yet come up, ifthey ever will. The great Mississippi Valley was under water andabove water time after time during the Palaeozoic period. The lastgreat invasion of the land by the sea, and probably the greatest ofall, seems to have been in Cretaceous times, at the end of theMesozoic period. There were many minor invasions during Tertiarytimes, but none on so large a scale as this Cretaceous invasion. Atthis time a large part of North and South America, and of Europe, and parts of Asia and Australia went under the ocean. It was as ifthe earth had exhaled her breath and let her abdomen fall. The seaunited the Gulf of Mexico with the Arctic Ocean, and covered thePrairie and the Gulf States and came up over New Jersey to the footof the Archaean Highlands. This great marine inundation probablytook place several million years ago. It was this visitation of thesea that added the vast chalk beds to England and France. In partsof this country limestone beds five or six thousand feet thick werelaid down, as well as extensive chalk beds. The earth seems to havetaken another hitch in her girdle during this era. As the land wentdown, the mountains came up. Most of the great Westernmountain-chains were formed during this movement, and the mountainsof Mexico were pushed up. The Alps were still under the sea, but theSierra and the Alleghanies were again lifted. 

It is very interesting to me to know that in Colorado charred wood, and even charcoal, have been found in Cretaceous deposits. The factseems to give a human touch to that long-gone time. It was, ofcourse, long ages before the evolution of man, as man, had takenplace, yet such is the power of association, that those charredsticks instantly call him to mind, as if we had come upon the placeof his last campfire. At any rate, it is something to know that man, when he did come, did not have to discover or invent fire, but thatthis element, which has played such a large part in his developmentand civilization, was here before him, waiting, like so many otherthings in nature, to be his servant and friend. As Vulcan waseverywhere rampant during this age, throwing out enough lava inIndia alone to put a lava blanket four or five feet thick over thewhole surface of the globe, it was probably this fire that charredthe wood. It would be interesting to know if these enormouslava-flows always followed the subsidence of some part of theearth's crust. In Cretaceous times both the subsidence and the lava-flows seem to have been worldwide. 

IV

We seem to think that the earth has sown all her wild oats, that herriotous youth is far behind her, and that she is now passing into aserene old age. Had we lived during any of the great periods of thepast, we might have had the same impression, so tranquil, for themost part, has been the earth's history, so slow and rhythmical havebeen the beats of the great clock of time. We see this in thehomogeneity of the stratified rocks, layer upon layer for thousandsof feet as uniform in texture and quality as the goods a modernfactory turns out, every yard of it like every other yard. No hitchor break anywhere. The bedding-planes of many kinds of rock occur atas regular intervals as if they had been determined by some kind ofmachinery. Here, on the formation where I live, there are alternatelayers of slate and sandstone, three or four inches thick, forthousands of feet in extent; they succeed each other as regularly asthe bricks and mortar in a brick wall, and are quite as homogeneous. What does this mean but that for an incalculable period theprocesses of erosion and deposition went on as tranquilly as asummer day? There was no strike among the workmen, and no change inthe plan of the building, or in the material. 

The Silurian limestone, the old red sandstone, the Hamilton flag, the Oneida conglomerate, where I have known them, are as homogeneousas a snowbank, or as the ice on a mountain lake; grain upon grain, all from the same source in each case, and sifted and sorted by thesame agents, and the finished product as uniform in color andquality as the output of some great mill. 

Then, after a vast interval, there comes a break: something like anend and a new beginning, as if one day of creation were finished anda new one begun. The different formations lie unconformably uponeach other, which means revolution of some sort. There has been astrike or a riot in the great mill, or it has lain idle for a longperiod, and when it has resumed, a different product is the result. Something happened between each two layers. What?

Though in remote geological ages the earth-building andearth-shaping forces were undoubtedly more active than they are now, and periods of deformation and upheaval were more frequent, yet hadwe lived in any of those periods we should probably have found thecourse of nature, certainly when measured by human generations, aseven and tranquil as we find it to-day. The great movements are soslow and gentle, for the most part, that we should not have beenaware of them had we been on the spot. Once in a million or ahalf-million years there may have been terrific earthquakes andvolcanic eruptions, such as seem to have taken place in Tertiarytime, and at the end of the Palaeozoic period. Yet the vaststretches of time between were evidently times of tranquillity. 

It is probable that the great glacial winter of Pleistocene timescame on as gradually as our own winter, or through a long period ofslowly falling temperature, and as it seems to have been manyhundred thousand times as long, this preceding period, or greatfall, was probably equally long--so long that the whole of recordedhuman history would form but a small fraction of it. It may easilybe, I think, that we are now living in the spring of the great cycleof geologic seasons. The great ice-sheet has withdrawn into the FarNorth like snowbanks that linger in our wood in late spring, whereit still covers Greenland as it once covered this country. When theseason of summer is reached, some hundreds of thousands of yearshence, it may be that tropical life, both animal and vegetable, willagain flourish on the shores of the Arctic Ocean, as it did inTertiary times. And all this change will come about so quietly andso slowly that nobody will suspect it. 

That the crust of the earth is becoming more and more stable seems anatural conclusion, but that all folding and shearing and disruptionof the strata are at an end, is a conclusion we cannot reach in theface of the theory that the earth is shrinking as it cools. 

The earth cools and contracts with almost infinite slowness, and thegreat crustal changes that take place go on, for the most part, soquietly and gently that we should not suspect them were we presenton the spot, and long generations would not suspect them. Elevationshave taken place across the beds of rivers without deflecting thecourse of the river; the process was so slow that the river saweddown through the rock as fast as it came up. Nearly all the greatcosmic and terrestrial changes and revolutions are veiled from us bythis immeasurable lapse of time. 

Any prediction about the permanence of the land as we know it, or asthe race has known it, or of our immunity from earthquakes orvolcanic eruptions, or of a change of climate, or of any cosmiccatastrophe, based on human experience, is vain and worthless. Whatis or has been in man's time is no criterion as to what will be inGod's time. The periods of great upheaval and deformation in theearth's crust appear to be separated by millions of years. Away backin pre-Cambrian times, there appear to have been immense periodsduring which the peace and repose of the globe were as profound asin our own time. Then at the end of Palaeozoic time--how manymillions of years is only conjectural--the truce of aeons wasbroken, and the dogs of war let loose; it was a period of revolutionwhich resulted in the making of one of our greatestmountain-systems, the Appalachian, and in an unprecedentedextinction of species. Later eras have witnessed similarrevolutions. Why may they not come again? The shrinking of thecooling globe must still go on, and this shrinking must give rise tosurface disturbances and dislocations, maybe in the uplift of newmountain-ranges from the sea-bottom, now undreamed of, and involcanic eruptions as great as any in the past. Such a shrinkage anderuption made the Hawaiian Islands, probably in Tertiary times; sucha shrinkage may make other islands and other continents beforeanother period of equal time has elapsed. 

Of course the periods and eras into which the geologists dividegeologic time are as arbitrary as the months and seasons into whichwe divide our year, and they fade out into each other in much thesame way; but they are really as marked as our seasonal divisions. Not in their climates--for the climate of the globe seems to havebeen uniformly warm from pole to pole, without climatic zones, throughout the vast stretch of Palaeozoic and Mesozoic times--but inthe succession of animal and vegetable life which they show. Therocks are the cemeteries of the different forms of life that haveappeared upon the globe, and here the geologist reads theirsuccession in time, and assigns them to his geologic horizonsaccordingly. The same or allied forms appeared upon all parts of theearth at approximately the same time, so that he can trace hisdifferent formations around the world by the fossils they hold. Eachperiod had its dominant forms. The Silurian was the great age oftrilobites; the Devonian, the age of fishes; Mesozoic times swarmwith the gigantic reptiles; and in Tertiary times the mammals aredominant. Each period and era has its root in that which precededit. There were rude, half-defined fishes in the Silurian, andprobably the beginning of amphibians in the Devonian, and some smallmammalian forms in the Mesozoic time, and doubtless rude studies ofthe genus Homo in Tertiary times. Nature works up her higher formsJike a human inventor from rude beginnings. Her first models barelysuggest her later achievements. 

In the vegetable world it has been the same; from the first simplealgae in the Cambrian seas up to the forests of our own times, thegradation is easily traced. Step by step has vegetable life mounted. The great majority of the plants and animals of one period fail topass over into the next, just as our spring flowers fail to passover into summer, and our summer flowers into fall. But the law ofevolution is at work, and life always rises on stepping-stones ofits dead self to higher things. 

V

HOLIDAYS IN HAWAII

I

On the edge of the world my islands lie, " sings Mrs. Frear in herlittle lyric on the Hawaiian Islands. 

 "On the edge of the world my islands lie, Under the sun-steeped sky; And their waving palms Are bounteous alms To the soul-spent passer-by. 

 "On the edge of the world my islands sleep In a slumber soft and deep. What should they know Of a world of woe, And myriad men that weep?"

On the rim of the world my fancy seemed to see them that May daywhen we went aboard the huge Pacific steamship in San FranciscoHarbor, and she pointed her prow westward toward the vast wildernessof the Pacific--on the edge of the world, looking out and downacross the vast water toward Asia and Australia. I wondered if thegreat iron ship could find them, and if we should realize orvisualize the geography or the astronomy when we got there, and seeourselves on the huge rotundity of the globe not far above herequatorial girdle. 

Yes, on the rim of the world they lie to the traveler steamingtoward them, and on the rim of the world they lie in his memoryafter his return, basking there in that tropical sunlight, foreverfanned by those cooling trade winds, and encompassed by thatmorning-glory sea. With my mind's eye I behold them rising from thatenormous abyss of the Pacific, fire-born and rain-carved, vastvolcanic mountains miles deep under the sea, and in some cases mileshigh above it, clothed with verdure and teeming with life, the sceneof long-gone cosmic strife and destruction, now the abode of ruraland civic peace and plenty. 

The Pacific treated me so much better than the Atlantic ever hadthat I am probably inclined to overestimate everything I saw on thevoyage. It was the first trip at sea that ever gave me any pleasure. The huge vessels are in themselves a great comfort, and in theplacid waters and the sliding down the rotund side of the greatglobe under warmer and warmer skies one gains a very agreeableexperience. The first day's run must have carried us out and overthat huge Pacific abyss, the Tuscarora Deep, where there were nearlyfour miles of water under us. Some of our aeroplanes have gone uphalf that distance and disappeared from sight. I fancy that ourship, more than six hundred feet long, would have appeared a verysmall object, floating across this briny firmament, could one havelooked up at it from the bottom of that sea. 

The Hawaiian Islands rise from the border of that vast deep, and onecan fancy how that huge pot must have boiled back in Tertiary times, when the red-hot lava of which they are mainly built up was pouredfrom the interior of the globe. 

Softer and more balmy grew the air every day, more and more placidand richly tinted grew the sea, till, on the morning of the sixthday, we saw ahead of us, low on the horizon, the dim outlines of themountains of Molokai. The island of Oahu, upon which Honolulu issituated, was soon in sight. It was not long before we saw DiamondHead, a vast crater bowl, eight hundred feet high on its ocean side, and half a mile across, sitting there upon the shore like some huge, strange work of man's hand, running back through the hills with alevel rim, and seaward with a sloping base, brown and ribbed, and inevery way unique and striking. 

We were approaching a land the child of tropic seas and volcaniclava, and many of the features were new and strange to us. Themountains looked familiar in outline, but the colors of thelandscape, the soft lilacs, greens, and browns, and the wholeatmosphere of the scene, were unlike anything we had ever beforeseen. And Diamond Head, what a feature it was! Had it only had ahead, one could easily have seen in it a suggestion of a couchantlion, bony, huge, and tawny, looking seaward, and guarding theharbor of Honolulu which lies just behind it. Into this harbor, inthe soft morning air, our ship soon found its way, and the monotonyof the vast, unpeopled sea was quickly succeeded by human scenes ofthe most varied and animated character, not the least novel of whichwere the swarms of half-amphibious native boys who surrounded thevessel as she lay at the wharf, and with brown, upturned faces andbeckoning hands tempted the passengers to toss dimes into the water. As the coins struck the surface they would dive with the ease andquickness of seals, and seize the silver apparently before it hadgone a yard toward the bottom. Holding the coins up to view betweenthe thumb and finger, they would slip them into their mouths andsolicit more. 

On shore we were greeted with the music of the Royal Hawaiian Band, and a motley crowd of Hawaiians, Japanese, Chinese, Portuguese, andAmericans, bearing colored leis, or wreaths of flowers, which theywaved at friends on board, and with which they bedecked them as soonas they came off the gangplank. It was a Babel of tongues in whichthe strange, vowel-choked language of the Hawaiians was conspicuous. 

Honolulu is a beautiful city, clean, bright, well ordered, and wellappointed, --electric lights, good streets, electric cars, finehotels and clubs, excellent fire protection, mountain water, libraries, parks, handsome buildings, attractive homes, --in fact, all that we boast of in our home cities. Embosomed in palms, withmangoes, and other tropical trees, with a profusion of gorgeouslycolored vines and hedges, with spacious, well-kept grounds about thelarge and comfortable houses in the residential portion--thesefeatures, with the ready hospitality of the people, made our heartswarm towards it at once. 

Volcanic heights on all the land side look down upon the city. MountTantalus, rising four thousand feet above the sea, is just back ofit, with its long slopes of volcanic ash and sand now clothed byforests and fertile fields, and a huge ancient crater called thePunch Bowl, born probably on the selfsame day, the geologists think, as Diamond Head, dominates the city in the immediate foreground. Ifthe Punch Bowl were again to overflow with the fiery liquid, thecity would soon go up in smoke. But its bowl-like interior is nowcovered with grass and trees, and presents a scene of the mostpeaceful, rural character. 

The Orient and the Occident meet in Honolulu. There Asia and Americajoin hands. The main features of the city are decidedly American, but the people seen upon the street and at work indoors and out aremore than half Oriental. The native population cuts only a smallfigure. The real workers--carpenters, masons, field hands, andhouse servants--are mostly Japanese. Virtually all the work of theimmense sugar plantations is done by the little brown men and women, while China supplies some of the merchants in the city and thesailors and stewards on the ocean steamers. What admirable servantsthe Chinese make, so respectful, so prompt, so silent, so quick tocomprehend! The Japanese house servants on the islands also giveefficient and gracious service. 

I had gone to Honolulu reluctantly, but tarried there joyfully. Thefine climate, with its even temperature of about eighty degreesFahrenheit, and with all that is enervating or oppressive in thatdegree of heat winnowed out of it by the ceaseless trade winds; thealmost unbroken sunshine, perfumed now and then by a sprinkle ofsunlit rain from the mountains; the wonderful sea laving the shoreson the one hand and the cool, cloud-capped, and rain-drenchedheights within easy reach on the other; the green, cozy valleys; thebroad sweep of plain; the new, strange nature on every side; thenovel and delicious fruits; the pepsin-charged papaya, or treemelon, which tickles the palate while it heals and renews the wholedigestive system; the mangoes (oh, the mangoes!); the cordiality ofthe people; the inviting bungalows; the clean streets; the goodservice everywhere--all made me feel how mistaken was my reluctance. 

Most of the Americans one meets there are descendants of themissionaries who went out from New England and New York early in thelast century, and one feels at home with them at once. Many of theresidents there have been educated in the States. The Governor, Mr. Frear, is a graduate of Yale; his wife is a graduate of Wellesley. One day a charming Southern woman, president of the College Club, invited us to meet the college women of the city. The gathering tookplace under the trees upon the lawn of one of the older homesteads. There were forty college women present, many of them teachers, fromVassar, Wellesley, Smith, Bryn Mawr, and Barnard. Among them weretwo girls who had visited me at my cabin, "Slabsides, " while theywere at Vassar. 

Wide as is the world, the traveler is pretty sure to strike threadsof relation with his home country wherever he goes. I made theacquaintance in Honolulu of a man from my own county; another, whoshowed us great kindness, was from an adjoining county; while oneday upon the street I was called by name by a man whom I had knownas a boy in the town where I now live. 

One Saturday a walking-club, largely made up of men and womenteachers, whose native Hawaiian name meant "Walkers in UnfrequentedPlaces, " asked us to join them in a walk up Palola Valley to thesite of an extinct crater well up in the mountains. These walkers inunfrequented places proved to be real walkers, and gave us all andmore than we had bargained for--more mud and wet and slippery trailsthrough clinging vines and rank lantana scrub than was good for ourshoes and garments or for the bodies inside them. It was a long pullof many miles, at first up the valley over a fair highway, then intothe woods on the mountain-side along a trail that was muddy andslippery from the recent showers, and most of the time was buriedout of sight beneath the high, coarse stag-horn fern and a thickgrowth of lantana that met above it as high as our shoulders. A morediscouraging mountain climb I never undertook. The vegetation wasall novel, but it had that barbaric rankness of all tropical woods, with nothing of the sylvan sweetness and simplicity of our homewoods. There were no fine, towering trees, but low, gnarled, andtortuous ones, which, with their hanging vines, like the brokenropes of a ship's rigging, and their parasitic growths, presented ariotous, disheveled appearance. 

Nature in the tropics, left to herself, is harsh, aggressive, savage; looks as though she wanted to hang you with her danglingropes, or impale you on her thorns, or engulf you in her ranks ofgigantic ferns. Her mood is never as placid and sane as in theNorth. There is a tree in the Hawaiian woods that suggests a treegone mad. It is called the hau-tree. It lies down, squirms, andwriggles all over the ground like a wounded snake; it gets up, andthen takes to earth again. Now it wants to be a vine, now it wantsto be a tree. It throws somersaults, it makes itself into loops andrings, it rolls, it reaches, it doubles upon itself. Altogether itis the craziest vegetable growth I ever saw. Where you can get it upoff the ground and let it perform its antics on a broad skeletonframework, it makes a cover that no sunbeam can penetrate, and formsa living roof to the most charming verandas--or lanais, as they arecalled in the islands--that one can wish to see. 

But I saw and heard one thing on this walk that struck a differentnote: it was one of the native birds, the Oahu thrush. The moment Iheard it I was reminded of our brown thrasher, though the song, orwhistle, was much finer and richer in tone than that of our bird. The glimpse I got of the bird showed it to be of about the size andshape of our thrasher, but much brighter in color. It seems asthough the two species must have had a common origin some time, somewhere. I was attracted by no other native bird on this walk. Inthe valley below we had seen and heard the Chinese workmen goingabout their rice-fields making strange sounds to drive away therice-birds, a small, brown species that has been introduced fromIndia. 

When we reached the mountain-top, we found it enveloped in fog andmist, and the scene was cold and cheerless. We looked down through ascreen of foliage into a deep valley that seemed almost beneath us, and which is supposed to have been an ancient crater. There, on thebrink, the walkers had a rude cabin, where we ate our lunch beside afire and tried to dry our bedraggled garments. 

From this point some of the party continued their walk, looking formore unfrequented places, but some of us had longings the other way, and retraced our steps toward the sunlight and the drier winds wehad left. We reached town footsore and bedraggled, and the littleJapanese who cleaned and pressed my suit of clothes, and made themlook as good as new for seventy-five cents, well earned his money. 

The walk of eight or ten miles which we took two weeks later withGovernor Frear and his wife, up the new Castle trail to themountain-top behind Tantalus, had some features in common with thefirst walk, --the increasing mist and coolness as we entered themountains, the dripping bushes, and the slippery paths, --but we gotfiner views, and found a better-kept trail. Our walk ended on thetop of a narrow ridge of the mountain, where we ate our lunch in acold, driving mist and were a bit uncomfortable. I was interested inthe character of the ridge upon which we sat. It was not more thansix feet wide, a screen of volcanic rock worn almost to an edge, andseparated two valleys six or seven hundred feet deep. The Governorsaid he could take me where the dividing ridge between the twovalleys was so narrow that one could literally sit astride of it, sothat one leg would point to one valley and the other to the other. This is a feature of a new country geologically; the rains and otheragents of erosion have whittled the mountains to sharp edges, buthave not yet rounded or leveled them. 

The northeast trade winds which blow upon these islands nine monthsin the year bring a burden of moisture from the Pacific which iscondensed into rain and mist by the mountains, and which, with therank vegetation that it fosters, carves them and sharpens them likea great grindstone revolving against their sides. At a place calledthe Pali--and at the Needles, on the island of Maui--it has wornthrough the mountain-chain and made deep and very picturesque gorgeswhere, in the case of the Pali, the wind is so strong and steadythat you can almost lie down upon it. 

It was near the Pali that I saw what I had never seen or heard ofbefore--a waterfall reversed, going up instead of down. It suggestedStockton's story of negative gravity. A small brook comes down offthe mountain and attempts to make the leap down a high precipice;but the winds catch it and carry it straight up in the air likesmoke. It is translated; it becomes a mere wraith hovering above thebeetling crag. Night and day this goes on, the wind snatching fromthe mountains in this summary way the water it has brought them. 

On the walk with the Governor we made the acquaintance of some ofthe land shells for which these islands are famous--pretty, pearl-like little whorls living on the largest trees, and about thesize of a chipping sparrow's egg, with pointed ends, variouslycolored. There are more than two hundred species on the differentislands, I think, each valley having varieties peculiar to itself, showing what a factor isolation is in the evolution of new species. The Governor and his wife, and a young man who had specialized inconchology, plucked them from nearly every bush and tree; but myeye, being untrained in this kind of work, was very slow in findingthem. 

Coming down from these Hawaiian mountains is like coming out of adripping tent of clouds into the clear, warm sunshine. The change ismost delightful. Your clothing dries very quickly, and chillinessgives place to genial warmth. And the prospects that open beforeyou, the glimpses down into these deep, yellow-green, crater-likevalleys, checkered with neat little Chinese farms, the panorama ofthe city and the sea unrolling as you come down, and always DiamondHead standing guard there to the east--how the vision of it alllingers in the memory!

In climbing the heights, it was always a surprise to me to see thePacific rise up as I rose, till it stood up like a great blue wallthere against the horizon. A level plain unrolls in the same way aswe mount above it, but it does not produce the same illusion ofrising up like a wall or a mountain-range; the blue, facile watercheats the eye. 

One of the novel pleasures in which most travelers indulge while inHonolulu is surf-riding at Waikiki, near Diamond Head. The sea, witha floor of lava and coral, is here shallow for a long distance out, and the surf comes in at intervals like a line of steeds canteringover a plain. We went out in our bathing-suits in a long, heavydugout, with a lusty native oarsman in each end. When severalhundred yards from shore, we saw, on looking seaward, the long, shining billows coming, whereupon our oarsmen headed the canoetoward shore, and plied their paddles with utmost vigor, utteringsimultaneously a curious, excited cry. In a moment the breakercaught us and, in some way holding us on its crest, shot us towardthe shore like an arrow. The sensation is novel and thrilling. Thefoam flies; the waters leap about you. You are coasting on the sea, and you shout with delight and pray for the sensation to continue. But it is quickly over. The hurrying breaker slips from under you, and leaves you in the trough, while it goes foaming on the shore. Then you turn about and row out from the shore again, and wait foranother chance to be shot toward the land on the foaming crest of agreat Pacific wave. 

I suppose the trick is in the skill of the oarsmen in holding theboat on the pitch of the billow so that in its rush it takes youwith it. The native boys do the feat standing on a plank. I wastempted to try this myself, but of course made a comical failure. 

One of my pleasant surprises in Honolulu--one that gave the touch ofnature which made me feel less a stranger there--was learning thatthe European skylark had been introduced and was thriving on thegrassy slopes back of the city. The mina, a species of starling fromIndia as large as our robin and rather showily dressed, with a loud, strident voice, I had seen and heard everywhere both in town andcountry, but he was a stranger and did not appeal to me. But thethought of the skylark brought Shelley and Wordsworth, and Englishdowns and meadows, near to me at once, and I was eager to hear it. So early one morning we left the Pleasanton, our tarrying-place, andclimbed the long, pastoral slope above the city, where cattle andhorses were grazing, and listened for this minstrel from themotherland. We had not long to wait. Sure enough, not far from usthere sprang from the turf Shelley's bird, and went climbing hisinvisible spiral toward the sky, pouring out those hurried, ecstaticnotes, just as I had heard him above the South Downs of England. Itwas a moment of keen delight to me. The bird soared and hovered, drifting about, as it were, before the impetuous current of hissong, with all the joy and abandon with which the poets havecredited him. It was like a bit of English literature vocal in theair there above these alien scenes. Presently another went up, andthen another, and still another, the singers behaving in everyrespect as they do by the Avon and the Tweed, and for a moment Iseemed to be breathing the air that Wordsworth and Shelley breathed. 

If our excursion had taken us only to the island of Oahu and itsbeautiful city, it would have been eminently worth while, but thelast week in May we took what is called the inter-island trip, a sixdays' voyage among the various islands, when we visited the greatextinct crater of Haleakala on Maui, and the active volcano Kilaueaon Hawaii. It is a voyage over several rough channels in a smallsteamer, and my friends said, "If you have not yet paid tribute toNeptune, you will pay it now. " But I did not. My companions wereprostrated, but I see Neptune respects age, and my slumbers wereundisturbed. A wireless message had gone to Mr. Aiken, on the islandof Maui, to meet us with his automobile in the morning at thelanding at Kahului. We were taken to the shore on a lighter, alongwith the horses and cargo, and there found our new friend awaitingus. 

The great mountain of Haleakala rose up in a long line against thesky on the left, and the deeply eroded and canyoned mountains of theolder, or west, end of the island on our right. Toward the latterour guide took us. It was a pleasant spin along the good roads, inthe fresh morning air, near the beach, to Wailuku, the shire town ofthe island, two or three miles distant. Here we were most hospitablyentertained in the home of Mr. Penhallow, the director of a largesugar plantation. 

Here for the first time in my life I saw a gang of steam plowsworking, pulled by a stationary engine at each end of the field, andturning over the red, heavy volcanic soil. The work was mainly inthe hands of Japanese, and was well done. We afterward saw Japaneseby the score, both men and women, planting a large area of newlyplowed land with sugar-cane. 

After we were rested and refreshed, and had sampled the mangoes thathad fallen from a tree near the house, Mr. Aiken took us in hisautomobile up into the famous Iao Valley, at the mouth of whichWailuku is situated. It is a deep, striking chasm carved out of themountain by the stream, rank with verdure of various kinds, andlooked down upon by sharp peaks and ridges five or six thousand feethigh. We soon reached the clear rapid, brawling stream, as bright asa Catskill mountain trout brook, and after a mile or two along itscourse we came to the end of the road, where we left the machine andtook a trail that wound onward and upward over a slippery surfaceand through dripping bushes, for we here began to reach the skirtsof the little showers that almost constantly career over and aboutthe interior of these mountains. I neither saw nor heard a bird orother live thing. Guava apples lay on the ground all along thetrail, and one could eat them and not make faces. Some of the sharp, knife-blade ridges that cut down toward us from the higher peakswere very startling, and so steep and high that they could besuccessfully scaled only by the aid of ropes and ladders. A morestriking object-lesson in erosion by rain would be hard to find. There were no naked rocks; short, thick vegetation covered even thesteepest slopes, and the vegetable acids which this generated, andthe perpetual rains, weathered the mountains down. It soon became sowet that we stopped far short of the head of the valley, and turnedback. I wished to look into the great, deep, green amphitheatrewhich seems to lie at the head, but had glimpses of it only from adistance. How many millenniums will it be, I said to myself, beforeerosion will have completed its work here, and these thin, highmountain-walls will be in ruins? Surely not many. 

We returned to the hospitable home we had left, and passed themidday there. In the afternoon Mr. Aiken, guiding our eyes by theforms of trees that cut the horizon-line on the huge flank ofHaleakala, pointed out the place of his own homestead, twenty ormore miles away. From this point the great mountain appeared like avast landscape tilted up at an easy angle against the horizon. Onecould hardly believe it was ten thousand feet high. The machineclimbed easily more than half the distance to Mr. Aiken'splantation, which we reached in good time in the afternoon, andwhere we passed a very enjoyable night. It was a surprise to findswarms of mosquitoes at this altitude, so free from allmosquito-breeding waters. But the house was well protected againstthem. Mosquitoes, as well as flies and vermin, are not native to theisland. They came in ships not very long ago, and are now verytroublesome in certain parts. They came round the Horn. Mr. Aiken'shouse itself came round the Horn seventy or eighty years ago. It isa quaint, New England type of house, and has a very homelike look. In front of it, near the gate, stands a Japanese pine which is anobject of veneration to all Japanese who chance to come that way. Often their eyes fill with tears on beholding it, so responsive arethe little yellow men to associations of home. 

In the morning Mr. Aiken drove us in a wagon to a place he hascalled "Idlewild, " six miles farther up the great slope of themountain. This slope of Haleakala is like a whole township, diversified with farms and woods, valleys and hills, resting on itselbows, so to speak, and looking out over the Pacific. We could lookup to the cloud-line, about seven thousand feet above the sea, andoccasionally get a glimpse of the long line of the summit throughrifts in the clouds. At Idlewild our expedition, consisting of sixmules and four people, was fitted out, and in the early afternoon westarted on the trail up the mountain. 

For several miles our way led over grassy slopes where cattle weregrazing, and above which skylarks were singing. This was one of thehappy surprises of the trip--the soaring and singing skylarks. Allthe way till we reached the cloud-belt, we had the larks pouringdown their music from the sky above us. They seemed speciallyjubilant. It was May in England, too, and they sang as though thespirit of those downs and fells was stirring in their hearts, underalien skies, but true to the memories of home. 

Before we reached the summit we came upon another introduction fromoverseas--the English pheasant. One started up from some bushes onlya few yards from the trail, went booming away, and disappeared in adeep gully. A little later another sprang up, uttering a cacklingcry as it flew away. We saw three altogether. The only home thing wesaw was white clover in patches here and there, and it gave a mostwelcome touch to the unfamiliar scenes. 

The cattle we passed on the way were suffering dreadfully fromanother introduction from the States--the Texas horn-fly, which hadrecently made its appearance. The poor beasts were driven half-crazyby it, as their sunken eyes and poor condition plainly showed. 

The trail became rougher and steeper as we ascended, and the grassand trees gave place to low, scrubby bushes. We were half an hour ormore in the cloud-belt, where the singing skylarks did not followus. The clouds proved to be as loose of texture and as innocent asany summer fog that loiters in our valleys; but it was good toemerge into the sunshine again, and see the jagged line of the topsensibly nearer, and the canopy of clouds unroll itself beneath us. Far ahead of us and near the summit we saw a band of wildgoats--twenty-two, I counted--leisurely grazing along, and now andthen casting glances down upon us. They were domestic animals gonewild, and still retained their bizarre colors of white and black. One big black leader with a long beard looked down at us and shookhis head threateningly. We reached the summit before the sun reachedthe horizon, and our eyes looked forth upon a strange world, indeed. On one hand the vast sea of cloud, into which the sun was about todrop, rolled away from the mountain below us, with its white surfaceand the irregular masses rising up from it, suggesting a sea offloating ice. Through rifts in it we caught occasional glimpses ofthe Pacific--blue, vague, mystical gulfs that seemed filled withsomething less substantial than water. On the other hand was thevast crater of Haleakala, two thousand feet deep, and many milesacross, in which the shadows were deepening, and which looked likesome burned-out Hades. 

We stood or sat on the jagged edge and saw the day depart and thenight come down, the glory of cloud and sea and sunset on the onehand, and on the other side the fearful chasm of the extinctvolcano, red and black and barren, with the hosts of darknessgathering in it. It was like a seat between heaven and hell. Thenlater, when the Southern Cross came out and rose above the awfulgulf, the scene was most impressive. 

The crater of Haleakala is said to be the largest extinct crater inthe world. To follow all its outlines would lead one a distance ofmore than twenty miles, but it is so irregular in shape that onegets only a poor conception of its extent in a view from its brink. At its widest part it cannot be more than four or five miles across. It was evidently formed by the whole top of the mountain having beenblown out or else sunk down in recent geologic times. The fragmentsof jagged rock that thickly strew the surface all about the summitlook as if they might have fallen there. The floor of the interiorof the crater is thickly studded with many minor craters, throughwhich the internal fires found vent after the crater as a whole hadceased to act. They are of the shape of huge haystacks, with a holein the top, and looked soft and yielding in outline, and in color asthough they were composed of soot and brick-dust. One of them ismuch larger than any of the rest. I thought it might be two hundredfeet high. "It is eight hundred, " said our guide; yet its summit wasmore than a thousand feet below the rim upon which we sat. 

There has been no eruption in Haleakala since early in the lastcentury. Over a large area of the interior the black lava, crackedand crumpled, meets the eye. Miles down one of its great arms towardthe sea, we could see the green lines of vegetation, mostly rankferns, advancing like an invading army. Far ahead were theskirmishers, loose bands of ferns, with individual plants here andthere pushing on over the black, uneven surface toward the secondarycraters of the centre. Vegetation was also climbing down the raggedsides of the crater, dropping from rock to rock like an invadinghost. The ferns, those pioneers of the vegetable world, appear tocome first. Their giant progenitors subdued the rocks and made thesoil in Carboniferous times, and prepared the way for highervegetable forms, and now these striplings take up the same task inthis primitive world of the crater of Haleakala. Their task is along and arduous one, much more so than in those parts of the islandwhere the rainfall is more copious; but give them time enough, andthe barren lava will all be clothed with verdure. When decomposedand ripened by time, it makes a red, heavy soil that supports manykinds of plants and trees. 

The ferns come slowly marching in from without, but in the centre ofthe crater, on the slopes of the red cones and at their bases, isanother plant that seems indigenous, born of the ash and the scoriaof the volcano, and that apparently has no chlorophyl in itsmake-up. This is a striking plant, called the silver sword, from theshape and color of its long, narrow leaves. They are the color offrosted silver, and are curved like a sword. It is a strangeapparition, white and delicate and rare, springing up in the craterof a slumbering volcano. A more striking contrast with theatmosphere of the surroundings would be hard to find--a suggestionof peace and purity above the graves of world-destroying forces, anangel of light nourished by the ashes of the demons of death anddarkness. 

It is claimed by the people of the island that this plant is foundin no other place on the globe, but this can hardly be possible. Ifits evolution took place in one crater, it would take place inanother. It consists of a great mass of silvery-white, bristlingleaves resting upon the ground, from which rises a stalk, strungwith flowers, to the height of five or six feet. It is evidently ofthe Yucca type of plant, and has met with a singular transformationin the sleeping volcano's mouth, all its harsh and savage characterturned into gentleness and grace, its armament of needles anddaggers giving place to a soft, silvery down. We did not see theplant growing except at a great distance, through field-glasses, butwe saw a photograph of it and a dried specimen after we came downfrom the summit. 

It is an all day's trip down into the crater and back, climbing oversliding sands and loose scoria, and our time was too limited toundertake it. We passed the night on the summit in a rude stone hut, which had a fireplace where the guide made coffee, but we had onlythe volcanic rock for floor. Upon this we spread our ample supply ofblankets, and got such sleep as is to be had on high, coldmountain-tops, where the ribs of the mountain prove to be so muchharder than one's own ribs--not a first-class quality of sleep, butbetter than none. 

I arose about two o'clock, and made my way out into the star-blazingnight. Such glory of the heavens I had never before seen. I hadnever before been lifted up so near them, and hence had never beforeseen them through so rarefied an atmosphere. The clouds and vaporshad disappeared, and all the hosts of heaven were magnified. TheMilky Way seemed newly paved and swept. There was no wind and nosound. The mighty crater was a gulf of blackness, but the sky blazedwith light. 

The dawn comes early on such a mountain-top, and before four o'clockwe were out under the fading stars. As we had seen the day pass intonight, surrounded by these wonderful scenes, now we saw the nightpass into day, and the elemental grandeur on every hand rebornbefore us. There was not a wisp of cloud or fog below us or about usto blur the great picture. The sun came up from behind the vast, long, high wall of the Pacific that filled the eastern horizon, andthe shadows fled from the huge pile of mountain in the west. We hungabout the rim of the great crater or sat upon the jagged rocks, wrapped in our blankets, till the sun was an hour high. 

We got another glimpse of the band of goats picking their way fromledge to ledge far below us on the side of the crater. I saw andheard two or three mina birds fly past, apparently seeking newterritory to occupy. These birds are more enterprising than theEnglish sparrows, which also swarm in the island towns but do notbrave the mountain-heights. The bird from India seems at homeeverywhere. 

After breakfast we still haunted for an hour or more the brink ofthe great abyss, where one seemed to feel the pulse of primal time, loath to tear ourselves away, loath also to take a last view of thepanorama of land and sea, lit by the morning sun, which spread outfar below us. To the southeast we could dimly see the outlines ofthe island of Hawaii, with a faint gleam of snow on its greatmountain Mauna Loa, nearly fourteen thousand feet high. In thenorthwest a dim, dark mass low in the horizon marked the place ofOahu. The ocean rose in the vast horizon and blended with the sky. The eye could not tell where one ended and the other began. 

The mules had had a comfortable night in a rude stone stable againstthe rocks, and were more eager to hit the down trail than were we. The descent proved more fatiguing than the ascent, the constantplunging motion of the animals' shoulders being a sore trial. Wedropped down through the belt of clouds that had begun to form, andout into the grassy region of the singing skylarks, past herds ofgrazing cattle, and at noon were again at Idlewild, resting ourweary limbs and comforting the inner man. 

In the afternoon Mr. Aiken drove us back to his home farm, where weagain passed a very pleasant night. In the morning I walked with himthrough his pineapple plantation. It was a new kind of farming andfruit-growing to me. I forget now how many hundred thousand plantshis field contained. They are set and cultivated much as cabbage iswith us, but present a strangely stiff and forbidding aspect. Thefirst cutting is when the plants are about eighteen months old, onelarge solid apple from each plant. The second crop is called the"raggoon" crop, and yields two apples from each plant, but smallerand less valuable than the first. The field is then reset. I alsowalked with Mr. Aiken over some new land he was getting ready forpineapples. It had been densely covered with lantana scrub, andclearing it and grubbing it out had been an heroic task. The lantanatakes complete possession of the soil, grows about four or five feethigh, and makes a network of roots in the soil that defies anythingbut a steam plow. The soil is a red, heavy clay, and it made thefarmer in me sweat to think of the expenditure of labor necessary toturn a lantana bush into a pineapple field. The redness of thisvolcanic soil is said to be owing to the fact that the growth ofvegetation brings the iron into new combinations with organic acids. 

Later in the day we visited the large Baldwin pineapple-canningplant, and were shown the whole process of preparing and canning thefruit, and all but surfeited with the most melting and deliciouspineapples it was ever my good luck to taste. The Hawaiian pineappleprobably surpasses all others in tenderness and lusciousness, and itloses scarcely any of these qualities in the cans. Ripened in thefield, where it grew on the flanks of great Haleakala, and eaten outof hand, it is a dream of tropic lusciousness. The canning is doneby an elaborate system of machinery managed by Japanese men andwomen, the naked hand never coming in contact with the peeled fruit, but protected from it by long, thin rubber gloves. There ought to bea great future for this industry, when Eastern consumers really findout the superior quality of the Hawaiian product. 

From Mr. Aiken's house one has a view of the great wall of mountainsthat form the western and older--older geologically--end of theisland, in which lies the famous Iao Valley, which I have alreadydescribed. We judge, from the much deeper marks of rain erosion, that this end of the island is vastly older than the butt end uponwhich Haleakala is situated. Haleakala is eroded comparativelylittle. On all its huge northern slope there is only oneconsiderable gash or gully, and this is probably not many thousandyears old; but the northwestern end of the island is worn and carvedin the most striking manner. Looking at it that morning, I comparedit to my extended, relaxed hand, the northern end being gashed andgrooved like the sunken spaces between the fingers, while thesouthwest end, not more than ten miles distant, was only slightlygrooved and more like the solid wrist and back hand. All the rainsbrought by the northeast trades fall upon the northeast end of theislands. The mountain-peaks on the end hold the clouds and stripthem dry, so that little or no rain falls upon the south andsouthwest sides. This is true of all the islands. One end of each isarid and barren, while the other is wet and verdant. One of thesmaller islands, Kahoolawe, I believe, dominated by Maui on thenortheast, is said to be drying up and blowing away by inches. 

What a spell the mountains do lay upon the clouds everywhere, --therobber mountains, --in these islands exacting the last drop of waterof all the ocean-born vapors that pass over them! On the northeastside of the Lahaina district there are valleys four or five thousandfeet deep; on the southwest side there are no valleys worthmentioning. The difference in this respect was forcibly brought hometo me when, later in the day, we made an automobile trip fromWailuku to Lahaina on the southwest side; in going less than twentymiles we quickly passed from the region of verdant valleys andmountain-slopes into a hard, raw, barren, unweathered region, wherethere was no soil, and where the rocks looked as crude andforbidding as they must have looked the day they flowed out from thedepths as molten lava. In outline the island of Maui suggests atruncated statue, the west end representing the head, very old andwrinkled and grooved by time and trouble, the peninsula thewell-proportioned neck, and broad-breasted Haleakala forming thetrunk. What a torso it is, fire-born and basking there in thetropic seas!

The oldest island of the Hawaiian group is Kauai, called the gardenisland, because it has much the deepest and most fertile soil. Itshows much more evidence of erosion than any of the other islands. The next in point of erosion, and hence in point of age, is Oahu, upon which Honolulu is situated. Then come Molokai and Maui, the twoends of the latter being of vastly unequal age. Hawaii, the largestof them all, nearly as large as Connecticut, is the youngest of thegroup, and shows the least effects of erosion. When it is as old asKauai is now, its two huge mountains, Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea, willprobably be cut up into deep valleys and canons and sharp, highridges, as are the mountains of Kauai and Oahu. The lapse of timerequired to bring about such a result is beyond all humancalculation. Whether one million or two millions of years would doit, who knows? Those warm tropical rains, aided by the rankvegetation which they beget and support, dissolve the volcanic rockslowly but inevitably. 

Through the courtesy of Mr. Lowell, the superintendent, we had thatday the pleasure of going through a large sugar-making plant atPaia--one that turns out nearly fifty thousand tons of sugar a year. We saw the cane come in from the fields in one end of the plant, andthe dry, warm product being put up in bags at the other. All thelatest devices and machinery for sugar-making we saw here in fulloperation, affording a contrast to the crude and wasteful methods Ihad seen in the island of Jamaica a few years before. 

In the afternoon we availed ourselves of the five or six miles ofnarrow-gauge railway, the only one on the island, to go from Paia toWailuku, where we were met by another automobile, which hurried usto Lahaina, where we were to meet the steamer that was to convey usto Hilo, on Hawaii. I say "hurried, " but before the journey oftwenty-odd miles was half over, we realized the truth of the oldadage, "The more haste, the less speed. " The automobile began tosulk and finally could be persuaded to go only on the low gear, andto rattle along at about the speed of a man with a horse and buggy. We reached Lahaina just as the boat was entering the harbor. 

The next morning we found ourselves steaming along past the high, verdant shores of Hawaii. For fifty miles or more the land presentedone unbroken expanse of sugar-cane, suggesting fields of somegigantic yellow-green grass. At Hilo the sun was shining betweenbrief showers, and the air was warm and muggy. It is said to rainthere every day in the year, and the lush vegetation made thestatement seem credible. Judge Andrews met us at the steamer, andtook us to his home for rest and dinner, and was extremely kind tous. 

In the mid-afternoon we took the train for Glenwood, thirty miles onour way to the volcano of Kilauea. A large part of the way the roadleads through sugar plantations, newly carved out of the koa andtree-fern wilderness that originally covered the volcanic soil. Clusters of the little houses of the Japanese laborers, perched highabove the ground on slender posts, were passed here and there. Everywhere we saw wooden aqueducts, or flumes, winding around thecontours of the hills and across the little valleys, often on hightrestle-work, and partly filled with clear, swift-running water, inwhich the sugar-cane was transported to the mills. 

At Glenwood stages meet the tourists and convey them over a fairlygood road that winds through the tree-fern forests to the VolcanoHouse, ten miles away. The beauty of that fern-lined forest, thelong, stately plumes of the gigantic ferns meeting the eyeeverywhere, I shall not soon forget. I saw what appeared to be alarge, showy red raspberry growing by the roadside, but I did notfind it at all tempting to the taste. 

It was dark when we reached the Volcano House, and we saw off to theleft a red glow upon the fog-clouds, like the reflected light froma burning barn or house in the country, and inferred at once that itcame from the volcano, which it did. From my window that night, as Ilay in bed, I could see this same angry glow upon the clouds. Thesmell of sulphur was in the air about the hotel, and very hot steamwas issuing from cracks in the rocks. A party of tourists onhorseback, in the spirit of true American hurry, visited the volcanothat night, but we chose to wait until the morrow. 

The next morning the great crater of Kilauea was filled with fog, but it lifted, and the sun shone before noon. We passed a pleasantforenoon strolling along the tree-fringed brink, looking down eightor nine hundred feet upon its black lava floor, and plucking oheloberries, which grew there abundantly, a kind of large, redhuckleberry that one could eat out of hand, but that one could notget excited over. They were better in a pie than in the hand. Theirname seemed to go well with the suggestion of the scenes amid whichthey grew. Kilauea is a round extinct crater about three milesacross and seven or eight hundred feet deep. It has been the sceneof terrific explosions in past ages, but it has now dwindled to thesmall active crater of Halemaumau, which is sunk near the middle ofit like a huge pot, two hundred or more feet deep and a thousandfeet across. 

In the mid-afternoon a party of eight or ten of us on horseback setout to visit the volcano. The trail led down the broken and shelvingside of the crater, amid trees and bushes, till it struck the floorof lava at the bottom. In going down I was aware all the time of abeautiful bird-song off on my left, a song almost as sweet as thatof our hermit thrush, but of an entirely different order. I think itwas the song of one of the honey-suckers, a red bird with blackwings that in flight looked like our scarlet tanager. 

Our course took us out over the cracked and contorted lava-beds, where no green thing was growing. The forms of the lava-flowsuggested mailed and writhing dragons, with horrid, gaping mouthsand vicious claws. The lava crunched beneath the horses' feet likeshelly and brittle ice. At one point we passed over a wide, jaggedcrack on a bridge. As we neared the crater, the rocks grew warm, andsulphur and other fumes streaked the air. 

When a half-mile from the crater we dismounted, and, leaving ourhorses in charge of the guide, proceeded on foot over the crackedand heated lava rocks toward the brink of this veritable devil'scaldron. The sulphur fumes are so suffocating that it can beapproached only on the windward side. The first glance into thatfearful pit is all that your imagination can picture it. You lookupon the traditional lake of brimstone and fire, and if devils wereto appear skipping about over the surface with pitchforks, turningtheir victims as the cook turns her frying crullers in thesputtering fat, it would not much astonish you. This liquid israther thick and viscid, but it is boiling furiously. Great massesof it are thrown up forty or fifty feet, and fall with a crash likethat of the surf upon the shore. Livid jets are thrown up many feethigh against the sides and drip back, cooling quickly as the lavadescends. We sat or stood upon the brink, at times almost lettingour feet hang over the sides, and shielding our faces from theintense heat with paper masks and veils. It is probably the onlyplace in the world where you can come face to face with the heart ofan active volcano. There are no veils of vapor to hide it from you. It appears easy enough to cast a stone into the midst of it, butnone of us could quite do it. 

The mass of boiling lava is said to be about one and one half acresin extent. Its surface is covered with large masses of floatingcrust, black and smooth, like leather or roofing-paper, and betweenthese masses, or islands, the molten lava shows in broad, vividlines. It is never quiet. When not actually boiling, there is a slowcirculatory movement, and the great flakes of black crust, suggesting scum, drift across from one end to the other and aredrawn under the rocks. At one moment only this movement is apparent, then suddenly the mass begins to boil furiously all over thesurface, and you hear dimly the sound of the bursting bubbles andthe crash of the falling lava. When this takes place, the blackfloating masses are broken up and scattered as they are in boilingmaple-syrup, but they quickly reunite, and are carried on by thecurrent as before. 

Looking upon this scene with the thought of the traditional lake offire and brimstone of our forefathers in mind, you would say thatthese black, filthy-looking masses floating about on the surfacewere the accumulation of all the bad stuff that had been fried outof the poor sinners since hell was invented. How much wickedness anduncharity and evil thought it would represent! If the poor victimswere clarified and made purer by the process, then it would seemworth while. 

At the Volcano House they keep a book in which tourists write downtheir impressions of the volcano. A distinguished statesman had beenthere a few days before us, and had written a long account of hisimpressions, closing with this oratorical sentence: "No pen, howevergifted, can describe, no brush, however brilliant, can portray, thewonders we have been permitted to behold. " I could not refrain fromwriting under it, "I have seen the orthodox hell, and it's the realthing. "

That huge kettle of molten metal, mantling and bubbling, how it isimpressed upon my memory! It is a vestige of the ancient cosmic firethat once wrapped the whole globe in its embrace. It had a kind ofbrutal fascination. One could not take one's eyes from it. Thatnetwork of broad, jagged, fiery lines defining those black, smoothmasses, or islands, of floating matter told of a side of nature wehad never before seen. We lingered there on the brink of the fearfulspectacle till night came on, and the sides of the mighty caldron, and the fog-clouds above it, glowed in the infernal light. Not sowhite as the metal pouring from a blast furnace, not so hot, a moresullen red, but welling up from the central primordial fires of theearth. This great pot has boiled over many times in the recent past, as the lava-beds we traveled over testify, and it will probably boilover again. It has been unusually active these last few years. 

About nine o'clock we rode back, facing a cold, driving mist, theback of each rider, protected by the shining yellow "slickers, "glowing to the one behind him, in the volcano's light, till we werea mile or more away. 

The next morning came clear, and the sight of the mighty slope ofMauna Loa, lit up by the rising sun, was a grand spectacle. Itlooked gentle and easy of ascent, wooded here and there, and hereand there showing broad, black streaks from the lava overflows atthe summit in recent years; but remembering that it was nearly fourthousand feet higher than Haleakala, I had no desire to climb it. This mountain and its companion, Mauna Kea, are the highest islandmountains in the world. 

The stage rolled us back through the fern forest to the railwaystation and thence on to Hilo again, where in good time, in theafternoon, we went aboard the steamer; and the next morning we wereagain in the harbor of Honolulu, glad we had made the inter-islandtrip, and above all glad that we had seen Haleakala. 

VI

THE OLD ICE-FLOOD

I

He was a bold man who first conceived the idea of the greatcontinental ice-sheet which in Pleistocene times covered most of thenorthern part of the continent, and played such a part in shapingthe land as we know it. That bold man was Agassiz, who, however, wasnot bold enough to accept the theory of evolution as propounded byDarwin. The idea of the great glacier did not conflict withAgassiz's religious predilections, and the theory of evolution did. It was a bold generalization, this of the continental ice-sheet, oneof the master-strokes of the scientific imagination. It was aboutthe year 1840 that Agassiz, fresh from the glaciers of the Alps, went to Scotland looking for the tracks of the old glaciers, and hefound them at once when he landed near Glasgow. We can all find themnow on almost every walk we take to the fields and hills; but untilour eyes are opened, how blind we are to them! We are like peoplewho camp on the trail of an army and never suspect an army haspassed, though the ruts made by their wagons and artillery and theruins of their intrenchments are everywhere visible. 

When I was a boy on the farm we never asked ourselves questionsabout the stones and rocks that encumbered the land--whence theycame, or what the agency was that brought them. The farmers believedthe land was created just as we saw it--stones, boulders, soil, gravel-pits, hills, mountains, and all--and doubtless wished intheir hearts that the Creator had not been so particular about therocks and stones, or had made an exception in favor of their ownfields. Rocks and stones were good for fences and foundations, andfor various other uses, but they were a great hindrance to thecultivation of the soil. I once heard a farmer boast that he hadvery strong land--it had to be strong to hold up such a crop ofrocks and stones. When the Eastern farmer moved west into theprairie states, or south into the cotton-growing states, he probablynever asked himself why the Creator had not cumbered the ground withrocks and stones in those sections, as he had in New York and NewEngland. South of the line that runs irregularly through middle NewJersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, and so on tothe Rockies, he will find few loose stones scattered over the soil, no detached boulders sitting upon the surface, no hills or mounds ofgravel and sand, no clay banks packed full of rounded stones, littleand big, no rocky floors under the soil which look as if they hadbeen dressed down by a huge but dulled and nicked jack-plane. Thereason is that the line I have indicated marks the limit of the oldice-sheet which more than a hundred thousand years ago covered allthe northern part of the continent to a depth of from two to fourthousand feet, and was the chief instrument in rounding offmountain-tops, scattering rock-fragments, little and big, over ourlandscapes, grinding down and breaking off the protruding rockstrata, building up our banks of mingled clay and stone, changingthe courses of streams and rivers, deepening and widening ourvalleys, transplanting boulders of one formation for hundreds ofmiles, and dropping them upon the surface of another formation. Whenit began to melt and retreat, it was the chief agent in building upour river terraces, and our long, low, rounded hills of sand andgravel and clay, called kames and drumlins. In many of our valleysits flowing waters left long, low ridges, gentle in outline, made upentirely of sand and gravel, or of clay. In other places it leftmoraines made up of earth, gravel, and rock-fragments that make avery rough streak through the farmer's land. All those high, levelterraces along the Hudson, such as that upon which West Pointstands, were the work of the old ice-sheet that once filled theriver valley. The melting ice was also the chief agent in buildingup the enormous clay-banks that are found along the shores of theHudson. The clay formed in very still waters, the sand and gravel inmore active waters. 

This great ice-sheet not only covered our northern farms with rocksand stones, and packed the soil with rounded boulders, but it alsocarried away much of the rock decay that goes to the making of thesoil, so that the soil is of greater depth in the non-glaciated thanin the glaciated areas of the country. The New-Englander orNew-Yorker in traveling in the Southern States may note the enormousdepth of soil as revealed by the water-courses or railroad cuts. Theice-sheet was a huge mill that ground up the rocks in the Northprobably as fast or faster than the rains and the rank vegetationreduced them in the South, but the floods of water which it finallylet loose carried a great deal of the rock-waste into the sea. 

The glacier milk which colors the streams that flow from beneath itfinally settles and makes clay. Off the great Malaspina Glacier inAlaska the ocean is tinged by the glacier milk for nearly fiftymiles from the shores. Very few country people, even among theeducated, are ready to believe that this enormous ice-sheet everexisted. To make them believe that it is just as much a fact in thephysical history of this continent as the war of the Revolution is afact in our political history is no easy matter. It certainly is acrushing proposition. It so vastly transcends all our experiencewith ice and snow, or the experience of the race since the dawn ofhistory, that only the scientific imagination and faith are equal toit. The belief in it rests on indubitable evidence, its record iswritten all over our landscape, but it requires, I say, thescientific imagination to put the facts together and make acontinuous history. 

Three or four hundred feet above my cabin, five or six hundred feetabove tidewater, there is a bold rocky point upon which the oldice-sheet bore heavily. It has rubbed it down and flattened it as ahand passing over a knob of soft putty might do. The great hand inthis case moved from the northeast and must have fairly made thisrocky prominence groan with its weight. The surface, scratched andgrooved and planed by the ice, has weathered away, leaving the rockquite rough; its general outlines alone tell the tale of the battlewith the ice. But on the east side a huge mass of rock, that hadbeen planed and gouged by the glacier, was detached and toppledover, turning topsy-turvy before it had weathered, and it lies insuch a position, upheld by two rock fragments, that its glaciatedsurface, though protected from the weather, is clearly visible. Youstep down two or three feet between the two upholding rocks and areat the entrance of a little cave, and there before you, standing atan angle of thirty or forty degrees, is this rocky page written overwith the history of the passing of the great ice plane. The surfaceexposed is ten or twelve feet long, and four or five feet wide, andit is as straight and smooth, and the scratches and grooves are assharp and distinct as if made yesterday. I often take the collegegirls there who come to visit me, to show them, as I tell them, where the old ice gods left their signatures. The girls take turnsin stooping down and looking along the under surface of the rock, and feeling it with their hands, and marveling. They have read orheard about these things, but the reading or hearing made littleimpression upon their minds. When they see a concrete example, andfeel it with their hands, they are impressed. Then when I tell themthat there is not a shadow of a doubt but that the ice was at onetime two or three thousand feet thick above the place where they nowstand, and that it bore down upon Julian's Rock with a weight ofthousands of tons to the square foot, that it filled all the HudsonRiver Valley, and covered the landscape for thousands of milesaround them, riding over the tops of the Catskills and of theAdirondacks, and wearing them down and carrying fragments of rocktorn from them hundreds of miles to the south and southwest, --whenI have told them all of this, I have usually given them a mouthfultoo big for them to masticate or swallow. As a sort of abstractproposition contained in books, or heard in the classroom, they donot mind it, but as an actual fact, here in the light of common dayon the hill above Slabsides, with the waters of the Hudsonglistening below, and the trees rustling in the wind all about us, that is quite another matter. It sounds like a dream or a fable. Many of the processes that have made our globe what we see it havebeen so slow and on such a scale that they are quite beyond ourhorizon--beyond the reach of our mental apprehension. The mind hasto approach them slowly and tentatively, and become familiar withthe idea of them, before it can give any sort of rational assent tothem. It has taken the geologist a long time to work out and clearup and confirm this conception of the great continental glacierwhich in Pleistocene times covered so large a part of the northernhemisphere. It is now as well established as any event in the remotepast well can be. In Alaska, and in the Swiss Alps, one may see theice doing exactly what the Pleistocene ice-sheet did over thiscountry. 

II

The other day in passing a farmer's house I saw where he had placeda huge, roundish boulder, nearly as high as a man's head, by theroadside and had cut upon it his own name and date, and that of hisfather before him, and that of the first settler upon the farm, inthe latter part of the eighteenth century. It was an interestingmonument. I learned that the rock had been found in the bed of asmall creek near by, and that the farmer had given a hundred dollarsto have it moved to its place in front of his house. Had I seen theold farmer I am sure I could have added to his interest and pride inhis monument by telling him that it was Adiron-dack gneiss, and hadbeen brought from that region on the back, or in the maw, of aglacier, many tens of thousands of years ago. But it is highlyprobable that, were he an uneducated man, he would have treated mystatement with contempt or incredulity. Education does at least thisfor a man: it opens his mind and makes him less skeptical aboutthings not dreamed of in his philosophy. 

This boulder had been rolled and worn in its long, slow ride till itwas nearly round. I have a much smaller boulder, probably from thesame quarry, which I planted at the head of my garden for a seatwhen the hoe gets tired. When it was dropped here on the land thatis now my field, the bed and valley of the Hudson were occupied bythe old glacier which, during its decline and recession, built upthe terraces opposite me (where now stands a multimillionaire's copyof an Italian palace), and which added to and uncovered the riverslopes where now my own vineyards are planted. 

The flowing or the creeping of this old ice-sheet, so that it couldtransport large boulders hundreds of miles, is one of the mostremarkable things about it: as slow or slower than the hour-hand ofthe clock, yet an actual progression, carrying it, in the course ofthousands of years, from its apex in Labrador well down into NewJersey, where its terminal moraine is still clearly traceable. 

A river of ice, under the right conditions, flows as literally as ariver of water, fastest in the middle, and slowest along its marginswhere the friction is greatest. The old ice-sheet, or ice sea, flowed around and over mountains as a river flows around and overrocks. Where a mountain rose above the glacier, the ice divided andflowed round it, and reunited again beyond it. One may see all thisin Alaska at the present time. Water, of course, flows because ofits own pressure; so does ice, only the pressure has to be vastlygreater. A drop of water on the table does not flow, but, pile ithigh enough, and it will. The old ice sea flowed mainly south, notbecause it was downhill in that direction, but because theaccumulation of ice and snow at the North was so great. If throughany climatic changes, the snowfall were ever again to be so greatthat more snow should fall in winter than could melt in summer, after the lapse of thousands of years, we should have another iceage. 

VII

THE FRIENDLY SOIL

I never tire of contemplating the soil itself, the mantle rock, asthe geologist calls it. It clothes the rocky framework of the earthas the flesh clothes our bones. It is the seat of the vitality ofthe globe, the youngest part, the growing, changing part. Out of itwe came, and to it we return. It is literally our mother, as the sunis our father. 

The soil!--the residuum of the rocks, the ashes of the mountains. Weknow what a vast stretch of time has gone to the making of it; thatit has been baked and boiled and frozen and thawed, acted upon bysun and star and wind and rain; mixed and remixed and kneaded andadded to, as the housewife kneads and moulds her bread; that it haslain under the seas in the stratified rocks for incalculable ages;that chemical and mechanical and vital forces have all had a hand inits preparation; that the vast cycles of animal and vegetable lifeof the foreworld have contributed to its fertility; that the life ofthe sea, and the monsters of the earth, and the dragons of the air, have left their ashes here, so that when I stir it with my hoe, orturn it with my spade, I know I am stirring or turning the meal of averitable grist of the gods. 

From its primal source in the Archaean rock, up through all the vastseries of sedimentary rocks to our own time, what vicissitudes andtransformations it has passed through; how many times it has died, so to speak, and been reborn from the rocks; how many times thewinds and the rains have transported it, and infused invisible, life-giving gases into it; how many of the elements have throbbedwith life, climbed and bloomed in trees, walked or flown or swam inanimals, or slumbered for thousands upon thousands of years beneaththe great ice-sheet of Pleistocene time! A handful of the soil byyour door is probably the most composite thing you can find in aday's journey. It may be an epitome of a whole geological formation, or of two or more of them. If it happens to be made up of decomposedlimestone, sandstone, slate, and basalt rock, think what a historywould be condensed in it!

Our lawns are made up of ashes from the funeral pyre of mountains, of dust from the tombs of geologic ages. What masses of rock doesthis sandbank represent! what an enormous grist in the great glaciermill do these layers of clay stand for! Two feet of soil probablyrepresent a hundred feet or more of rock. Strictly speaking, thesoil is the insoluble parts of the ground-up and decomposed rocks, after the rains and the winds have done their work and taken theirtoll of the grist they have ground. Sometimes these mills take thewhole grist and leave the rocks bare; but usually they leave aresiduum in which life strikes its roots. We do not see all that thewaters take from the soil. They have invisible pockets in which theycarry away all the more soluble parts, such as lime, soda, potash, silica, magnesia, and others, and leave for the land the moreinsoluble parts. These, too, in times of flood they carry away insuspension, in the shape of sand, silt, mud, gravel, and the like. When the waters really digest the rocks, they hold the variousminerals in solution, and run limpid and dancing to the sea; whenthey have an undigested burden, they run angry and turbid. 

It is estimated that the Hudson River deposits in the sea each yearfour hundred and forty thousand tons of mineral matter in solutionwhich it has taken from the land, and the Mississippi one hundredand twelve million tons. Each carries away about four times as muchin suspension. The digestive or chemical power of water, then, isonly about one fourth as great as its mechanical power. Between thetwo the land is made to pay heavy toll to the sea. But in time, ingeologic time, it all comes back. The suspended particles aredropped and go to make up the sedimentary rocks, while the soluteshelp cement the material of these rocks together, and also nourishthe sea life from which limestone and other organic rocks are made. When these rocks are again lifted to the surface and disintegratedinto soil, then the debt of the sea to the land is paid. Thisprocess, this cycle of soil loss and soil growth, has gone onthrough all time, and must continue as long as the rain continues tofall, or as long as the sea continues to send its tax-gatherers tothe land. In this great cycle of give and take of the elements, theaffairs of men cut but a momentary figure; how puny they are, howtransient! How the great changes, which in time amount torevolutions, go on over our heads and under our feet, and we rarelyheed them, and are powerless to stay them! A summer shower carriesthe soil of my side-hill, which is mainly disintegrated Silurianrock and shale, into the river, and some millions of years hence, when it has become stratified rock, and been lifted up into thelight of day, some other, and, I trust, wiser husbandman, will begathering his harvest from it, and be worried over the downpour thatrobs him of it. The farmer's worry is bound to come back with thesoil, and be passed along with it. 

VIII

PRIMAL ENERGIES

How puny and meagre is the utmost power man can put forth, even bythe aid of all his mechanical appliances, when compared with theprimal earth forces! Think, or try to think, of the force ofpressure that causes the rock-strata to buckle or crumple orbend--layers of rock, thousands of feet thick, made to fold and bendlike the leaves of a book--vast mountain-chains flexed andforeshortened, or ruptured and faulted as the bending of one's bodywrinkles or rips one's clothes. Think of the over-thrusts and thefolding and shearing of the earth's crust. The shrinking of theearth squeezes the rocks to an extent quite beyond our power ofconception. "So overpowering has been the horizontal movement insome cases, " says Dana, "that masses of rock thousands of feet inthickness have been buckled up and sheared, or, simply yielding topressure, have sheared without folding, and been thrust forward formiles along a gently inclined plane. These great reversed faults aretermed over-thrusts or thrust-planes. Sometimes such thrust-planesoccur singly, at other times the rocks have yielded again and again, great sheets having been sliced off successively, and driven forwardone upon the other. " In northern Montana there is an over-thrust ofthe Cambrian rocks upon the late Cretaceous, of seven or eightmiles, carrying with it what is now called "Chief Mountain, " whichhas been carved out of the extreme end of the over-thrust. Thecontemplation of such things gives one a sense of power in Naturebeyond anything else I know of. The shrinking of the globe as awhole makes its rocky garment too big for it, and this titanicwrinkling and folding results. When the strata snap asunder underthe strain, we have earthquakes. During the recent San Franciscoearthquake, Mount Tamalpais, across the bay, and all the neighboringheights, were permanently shifted eight or ten feet. The sides ofthe mountain, it is said, undulated like a curtain. And this shakingand twitching of the great rocky skin of the earth was vastly less, in proportion to the size of the globe, than the twitching andtrembling of the skin of a horse when he would shake off the flies, in comparison with the animal's body. 

We see another exhibition of the magnitude of the earth's forces inwhat the geologist calls a "laccolite"--a great cave or cistern deepbeneath the surface of stratified rock filled with hardened lava. The lava is forced up from an unknown depth under such pressurethat, not finding an outlet at the surface, the rock strata, hundreds or thousands of feet thick, are lifted up and arched likeso much paper, and in the cavity thus formed the pent-up molten lavafinds relief. These lava cisterns or pockets are sometimes uncoveredby the process of erosion. The Henry Mountains in Utah are alllaccolites. One of them, Mount Hillers, has a volume of about tencubic miles. Much of the overarching sedimentary strata still coversit. Geologists read the evidence of a similar formation called a"sill" on the west side of the Hudson in New Jersey, forming thePalisades. The lava worked like a giant mole up through and thenbeneath the Triassic sandstone, lifting the strata up and archingthem over a large area. During the millions of years that haveelapsed since that time, the layers of superincumbent sandstone havebeen worn away so that now one sees a wide, smooth, gentle slope ofbasaltic rock covered by a very thin coat of soil. As one goes by onthe train, one sees where the workmen of a stone-crushing plant havecut into the slope and uncovered the junction of the two kinds ofrock, one born of water, and one born of fire. The igneous rock sitssquarely upon the level sandstone, like a row of upright booksstanding upon a shelf. I never pass the place but that I want tostop the train and get out and have a close look at the precise spotwhere this son of Vulcan sat down so heavily and so hot upon hisbrother of the sedimentary deposits. 

Probably no two chapters of the earth's history differ more thanthose of the two sides of the Hudson at New York. There is a greatbreak here--a leap from Archaean times on the east side to Mesozoictimes on the west. The east side is millions of years the older. Here is the original Plutonic or Azoic rock which apparently hasnever been under the sea since it was first thrust up out of thefiery depths. The west shore, including the Palisades, belongs to amuch later geologic era. The original granite here is buried undervast deposits of sedimentary rock of the Triassic age--the age ofthe giant reptiles, the remains of one of which has recently beenfound embedded in this sandstone, near the river's edge. As thetraveler's eye follows along the even, almost level line of thisescarpment of the Palisades, let it re-create for him the strata ofthe old Triassic sandstone that were millions of years ago piledhigh upon it, --how high can only be conjectured, --but which havebeen removed grain by grain under the eroding power of the forces ofair and water that now seem to caress the huge wall so gently. Ah!geologic Time, what can it not do? what has it not done? The oldsill of Vulcan now presents a nearly vertical front to the Hudson, forming the Palisades, showing that some leaves of the earth'shistory here are missing, buried probably beneath the waters of theriver. There is evidently a line of fault here, and the west sidehas been lifted up out of the old Mesozoic seas, probably in theconvulsions that poured out the lava of the trap rock. 

IX

SCIENTIFIC FAITH

I find myself accepting certain things on the authority of sciencewhich so far transcend my experience, and the experience of the raceand all the knowledge of the world, in fact which come so near beingunthinkable, that I call my acceptance of them an act of scientificfaith. One's reason may be convinced and yet the heart refuse tobelieve. It is not so much a question of evidence as a question ofcapacity to receive evidence of an unusual kind. 

One of the conclusions of science which I feel forced to accept, andyet which I find very hard work to believe, is that of the animalorigin of man. I suppose my logical faculties are convinced, butwhat is that in me that is baffled, and that hesitates and demurs?

The idea of the origin of man from some lower form requires such aplunge into the past, and such a faith in the transforming power ofthe biological laws, and in the divinity that lurks in the soilunderfoot and streams from the orbs overhead, that the ordinary mindis quite unequal to the task. For the book of Genesis of the oldBible we have substituted the book of genesis of the rocky scriptureof the globe--a book torn and mutilated, that has been through fireand flood and earthquake shock, that has been in the sea and on theheights, and that only the palaeontologist can read or deciphercorrectly, but which is a veritable bible of the succession of lifeon the earth. The events of the days of creation are recorded here, but they are days of such length that they are to be reckoned onlyin millions of years. 

The evolution of the horse, according to the best and latestresearch, from the eohippus of Eocene times--a small mammal nolarger than the fox--to the proud and fleet creature that we prizeto-day, occupied four or five millions of years. Think of that firstknown progenitor of the horse as never dying, but living on throughthe geological ages and being slowly, oh, so slowly, modified by itsenvironment, changing its teeth, its hoofs, enlarging its body, lengthening its limbs, and so on, till it becomes the horse we knowto-day. 

In accepting the theory of the animal origin of man we have got tofollow man back, not only till we find him a naked savage like theFuegians as Darwin describes them, --naked, bedaubed with paint, withmatted hair and looks wild and distrustful, --but we cannot stopthere, we must follow him back till he becomes a troglodyte, acave-dweller, contending with the cave bear, the cave lion, and thehyena for the possession of this rude shelter; back still, till wefind him in trees living like the anthropoid apes; then back to theearth again to some four-footed creature, probably of the marsupialkind; still the trail leads downward and ever downward, till we loseit in that maze of marine forms that swarm in the Palaeozoic seas, or until the imagination is baffled and refuses to proceed. Itcertainly is a hard proposition, and it puts one upon his mettle toaccept it. 

Should we not find equal difficulty in believing the life-history ofeach one of us, --the start in the germ, then the vague suggestion offish, and frog, and reptile, in our foetal life, --were it not amatter of daily experience? Let it be granted that the race of manwas born as literally out of the animal forms below him as the childis born out of these vague, prenatal animal forms in its mother'swomb. Yet the former fact so far transcends our experience, and evenour power of imagination, that we can receive it only by an act ofscientific faith, as our fathers received the dogmas of the Churchby an act of religious faith. 

I confess that I find it hard work to get on intimate terms withevolution, familiarize my mind with it, and make it thinkable. Thegulf that separates man from the orders below him is so impassable, his intelligence is so radically different from theirs, and hisprogress so enormous, while they have stood still, that believing itis like believing a miracle. That the apparently blind groping andexperimentation which mark the course of evolution as revealed bypalaeontology--the waste, the delay, the vicissitudes, thehit-and-miss method--should have finally resulted in this supremeanimal, man, puts our scientific faith to the test. In the light ofevolution how the halo with which we have surrounded our originvanishes!

Man has from the earliest period believed himself of divine origin, and by the divine he has meant something far removed from this earthand all its laws and processes, something quite transcending themundane forces. He has invented or dreamed myths and legends tothrow the halo of the exceptional, the far removed, the mystical, orthe divine around his origin. He has spurned the clod with his foot;he has denied all kinship with bird and beast around him, and lookedto the heavens above for the sources of his life. And then unpityingscience comes along and tells him that he is under the same law asthe life he treads under foot, and that that law is adequate totransform the worm into the man; that he, too, has groveled in thedust, or wallowed in the slime, or fought and reveled, a reptileamong reptiles; that the heavens above him, to which he turns withsuch awe and reverence, or such dread and foreboding, are the sourceof his life and hope in no other sense than they are the source ofthe life and hope of all other creatures. But this is the way ofscience; it enhances the value or significance of everything aboutus that we are wont to treat as cheap or vulgar, and it discountsthe value of the things far off upon which we have laid such stress. It ties us to the earth, it calls in the messengers we send forthinto the unknown; it makes the astonishing revelation--revolutionary revelation, I may say--that the earth is embosomed inthe infinite heavens the same as the stars that shine above us, thatthe creative energy is working now and here underfoot, the same asin the ages of myth and miracle; in other words, that God is reallyimmanent in his universe, and inseparable from it; that we have beenin heaven and under the celestial laws all our lives, and knew itnot. Science thus kills religion, poetry, and romance only so far asit dispels our illusions and brings us back from the imaginary tothe common and the near at hand. It discounts heaven in favor ofearth. It should make us more at home in the world, and moreconscious of the daily beauty and wonders that surround us, and, ifit does not, the trouble is probably in the ages of myth and fablethat lie behind us and that have left their intoxicating influencein our blood. 

We are willing to be made out of the dust of the earth when Godmakes us, the God we have made ourselves out of our dreams and fearsand aspirations, but we are not willing to be made out of the dustof the earth when the god called Evolution makes us. An impersonallaw or process we cannot revere or fear or worship or exalt; we canonly study it and put it to the test. We can love or worship onlypersonality. This is why science puts such a damper upon us; itbanishes personality, as we have heretofore conceived it, from theuniverse. The thunder is no longer the voice of God, the earth is nolonger his footstool. Personality appears only in man; the universeis not inhuman, but unhuman. It is this discovery that we recoilfrom, and blame science for; and until, in the process of time, weshall have adjusted our minds, and especially our emotions, to it, mankind will still recoil from it. 

We love our dreams, our imaginings, as we love a prospect before ourhouses. We love an outlook into the ideal, the unknown in our lives. But we love also to feel the solid ground beneath our feet. 

Whether life loses in charm as we lose our illusions, and whether itgains in power and satisfaction as we more and more reach solidground in our beliefs, is a question that will be answereddifferently by different persons. 

We have vastly more solid knowledge about the universe amid which welive than had our fathers, but are we happier, better, stronger? Mayit not be said that our lives consist, not in the number of thingswe know any more than in the number of things we possess, but in thethings we love, in the depth and sincerity of our emotions, and inthe elevation of our aspirations? Has not science also enlarged thesphere of our love, and given us new grounds for wonder andadmiration? It certainly has, but it as certainly has put a damperupon our awe, our reverence, our veneration. However valuable theseemotions are, and whatever part they may have played in thedevelopment of character in the past, they seem doomed to play lessand less part in the future. Poetry and religion, so called, seemdoomed to play less and less part in the life of the race in thefuture. We shall still dream and aspire, but we shall not trembleand worship as in the past. 

We see about us daily transformations as stupendous as that of theevolution of man from the lower animals, and we marvel not. We seethe inorganic pass into the organic, we see iron and lime and potashand silex blush in the flowers, sweeten in the fruit, ripen in thegrain, crimson in the blood, and we marvel not. We see the spotlesspond-lily rising and unfolding its snowy petals, and its tremblingheart of gold, from the black slime of the pond. We contemplate ourown life-history as shown in our pre-natal life, and we are notdisturbed. But when we stretch this process out through the geologicages and try to see ourselves a germ, a fish, a reptile, in the wombof time, we are balked. We do not see the great mother, or the greatfather, or feel the lift of the great biologic laws. We are beyondour depth. It is easy to believe that the baby is born of woman, because it is a matter of daily experience, but it is not easy tobelieve that man is born of the animal world below him, and thatthat is born of inorganic Nature, because the fact is too big andtremendous. 

What we call Nature works in no other way; one law is over big andlittle alike. What Nature does in a day typifies what she does in aneternity. It is when we reach the things done on such an enormousscale of time and power and size that we are helpless. The almostinfinitely slow transformations that the theory of evolution demandsbalk us as do the size and distance of the fixed stars. 

No observation or study of evolution on a small scale and near athand in the familiar facts of the life about us can prepare us forit, any more than lake and river can prepare us for the ocean, orthe modeling of miniature valleys and mountains by the rain in theclay bank can open our minds to receive the tremendous facts of thecarving of the face of the continent by the same agents. 

We do not see evolution working in one day, or in a century, or inmany centuries. Neither do we catch the gods of erosion at theirHerculean tasks. They always seem to be having a holiday, or else tobe merely toying with their work. 

When we see a mound of earth or a bank of clay worn into miniaturemountain-chains and canons and gulches by the rains of a season, wedo not doubt our eyes; we know the rains did it. But when we see thesame thing copied in a broad landscape, or on the face of a state ora continent, we find it hard to believe the evidence of our ownsenses. The scale upon which it is done, and the time involved, putit so far beyond the sphere of our experience that something in us, probably the practical, everyday man, refuses to be convinced. 

The lay mind can hardly have any adequate conception of the parterosion, the simple weathering of the rocks, has played in shapingour landscapes, and in preparing the earth for the abode of man. Thechanges in the surface of the land in one's lifetime, or even in thehistoric period, are so slight that the tales the geologists tell usare incredible. 

When, during a recent trip through the great Southwest, I saw theearth laid open by erosion as I had never before dreamed of, especially when I visited those halls of the gods, the Grand Canonand Yosemite Valley, I found my capacity to believe in the erosivepower of water and the weather quite overtaxed. It must be true, Isaid, what the geologists tell us, that water and air did all this;but while you look and wait, and while generations before you havelooked and waited, all is as quiet and passive as if the slumber ofages wrapped hill and vale. Invisible giants have wrought and delvedhere of whom we never catch a glimpse, nor shall we, wait and watchwe never so long. No sound of their hammers or picks or shovels orof the dynamite ever breaks the stillness of the air. 

I have to believe that the valleys and mountains of my nativeCatskills were carved out of a great elevated plain or plateau;there is no other explanation of them. Here lie the level strata, without any bending or folding, or sign of convulsion and upheavals, horizontal as the surface of the sea or lake in which theirsediments were originally laid down; and here are these deep, widevalleys cut down through these many sheets of stratified rock; andhere are these long, high, broad-backed mountains, made up of therock that the forces of air and water have left, and with no forcesof erosion at work that would appreciably alter a line of thelandscape in ten thousand years; and yet we know, if we knowanything about the physical history of the earth, that erosion hasdone this work, carved out these mountains and valleys, from theDevonian strata, as literally as the sculptor carves his statue fromthe block of marble. 

Above my lodge on the home farm the vast layers of the gray, thin-sheeted Catskill rock crop out and look across the valley totheir fellows two or more miles away where they crop out in asimilar manner on the opposite slope of the mountain. With the eyeof faith I see the great sheets restored, and follow them across onthe line which they made aeons ago, till they are joined again totheir fellows as they were before the agents of erosion had sowidely severed them. 

These physical forces have worked as slowly and silently insculpturing the landscapes as the biological laws have worked inevolving man from the lower animals, or the vertebrates from theinvertebrates. The rains, the dews, the snows, the winds--how couldthese soft, gently careering agents have demolished these rocks anddug these valleys? One would almost as soon expect the wings andfeet of the birds to wear away the forests they flit through. Thewings of time are feathered also, and as they brush against thegranite or the flinty sandstone no visible particle is removed whileyou watch and wait. Come back in a thousand years, and you note nochange, save in the covering of trees and verdure. Return in tenthousand, and you would probably find the hills carrying their headsas high and as proudly as ever. Here and there the face of the cliffmay have given way, or a talus slid into the valley, or a stream orriver changed its course, or sawed deeper into the rock, and a lakebeen turned into a marsh, or the delta of a river broadened--minorchanges, such as a shingle from your roof or a brick from yourchimney, while your house stands as before. In one hundred thousandyears what changes should we probably find? Here in the Catskills, where I write, the weathering of the hills and mountains wouldprobably have been but slight. It must be fifty thousand years ormore since the great ice-sheet left us. Where protected by a thincoat of soil, its scratches and grooves upon the surface rock areabout as fresh and distinct as you may see them made in Alaska atthe present time. Where the rock is exposed, they have weatheredout, one eighth of an inch probably having been worn away. Thedrifting of the withered leaves of autumn, or of the snows of winterover them, it really seems, would have done as much in that stretchof time. Then try to fancy the eternity it has taken the subaerialelements to cut thousands of feet through this hard Catskillsandstone! No, the evolution of the landscape, the evolution of theanimal and vegetable kingdoms, the evolution of the suns andplanets, involve a process so slow, and on such a scale, that it isquite unthinkable. How long it took evolution to bridge the chasmbetween the vertebrate and the invertebrate, between the fish andthe frog, between the frog and the reptile, between the reptile andthe mammal, or between the lowest mammal and the highest, who canguess?

But the gulf has been passed, and here we are in this teeming worldof life and beauty, with a terrible past behind us, but a brighterand brighter future before us. 

X

"THE WORM STRIVING TO BE MAN"

When our minds have expanded sufficiently to take in and accept thetheory of evolution, with what different feelings we look upon thevisible universe from those with which our fathers looked upon it!Evolution makes the universe alive. In its light we see thatmysterious potency of matter itself, that something in the clodunder foot that justifies Emerson's audacious line of the "wormstriving to be man. " We are no longer the adopted children of theearth, but her own real offspring. Evolution puts astronomy andgeology in our blood and authenticates us and gives us the backingof the whole solar system. This is the redemption of the earth: itis the spiritualization of matter. 

In imagination stand off in vacant space and see the earth rollingby you, a huge bubble with all its continents and seas and changingseasons and countless forms of life upon it, and remember that youare looking upon a great cosmic organism, pulsing with the vitalcurrents of the universe, and that what it holds of living formswere not arbitrarily imposed upon it from without, but vitallyevolved from within and that man himself is one of its products asliterally as are the trees that stand rooted to the soil. Revert tothe time when life was not, when the globe was a half-incandescentball, or when it was a seething, weltering waste of heated water, before the land had yet emerged from the waves, and yet you and Iwere there in the latent potencies of the chemically and dynamicallywarring elements. We were there, the same as the heat and flame arein the coal and wood and as the explosive force of powder is in thegrains. The creative cosmic chemistry in due time brought us forth, and started us on the long road that led from the amoeba up to man. There have been no days of creation. Creation has been a continuousprocess, and the creator has been this principle of evolutioninherent in all matter. 

Man himself was born of this principle. His genealogy finally runsback to the clod under his feet. One has no trouble in accepting theold Biblical account of his origin from the dust of the earth whenone views that dust in the light of modern science. 

Man is undoubtedly of animal origin. He is embraced in the samezoological scheme as are all other creatures, and did not start asman any more than you and I started with our present stature, orthan the earth sprang from chaos as we now behold it. 

His complete physical evolution must have been achieved thousands ofcenturies ago, but his full mental and spiritual evolution is notyet. 

I think of his physical evolution as completed when he assumed theupright attitude or passed from a quadruped to a biped, which mustof itself have been a long, slow process. Probably our wholehistoric period would form but a fraction of this cycle ofunrecorded time. Man's complete emergence from the lower orders, sothat he stood off in sharp contrast to them in his physical formprobably occurred in later Tertiary times, and what the meaning ofthis stretch of time is in human years we can only conjecture. During this cycle of numberless millenniums till the dawn ofhistory, man's development was mainly mental. He left the brutecreature behind because his mind continued to develop after hisphysical form was complete, while the brute stood still. Whence theimpulse that sent man forward? Why was one animal form endowed withthe capacity for endless growth and development, and all the othersdenied it? Ah! that is the question of questions. Compared with thedevelopment of his bodily powers, man's mental and spiritual growthhas been very rapid. He seems to have been millions of years ingetting his body, while he has been only millenniums in getting hisreason and intelligence. What progress since the dawn of history!Compare the Germans of the time of Tacitus, or the Gauls of the timeof Caesar, or the Britons of the time of Hadrian with the people ofthose countries to-day. 

We are prone to speak of man's emergence from the lower orders as ifit were a simple thing, almost like the going from one country intoanother. But try to think what it means; try to think of the slowtransformation, of the long, toilsome road even from the halfwayhouse of our simian ancestors. If we do not give him the benefit ofthe sudden mutation theory of the origin of species, then think ofthe slow process, hair by hair, as it were, by which a tailed, apelike arboreal animal was transformed into a hairless, tailless, erect, tool-using, fire-using, speech-forming animal. We see in ourown day in the case of the African negro, that centuries of ourNorthern climate have hardly any appreciable effect toward making awhite man of him; nor, on the other hand, has exposure to thetropical sun had much more effect in making a negro of the whiteman. Probably it would take ten thousand years or more of theseconditions to bleach the pigments out of the one skin and put themin the other. There is convincing proof from painting and figuresfound in Egypt that neither the African negro nor the Egyptian haschanged in features in five thousand years. 

The most marvelous thing about man's evolution is the inborn upwardimpulse in some one low organism that rested not till it reached itsgoal in him. The mollusk remains, but some impulse went out from themollusk that begat the fish. The fish remains, but some impulse wentout from the fish that begat the amphibian. The amphibian remains, but some impulse went out from the amphibian that begat the reptile. The reptile remains, but some impulse went out from the reptile thatbegat the mammal; and so on up to man. Man must have had a specificline of descent. One golden thread must connect him with the lowestforms of life. And the wonder is that this golden thread was neversnapped or lost through all the terrible vicissitudes of thegeologic ages. But I suppose it is just as great a wonder that theline of descent of the horse, or the sheep, or the dog, or the bird, was not snapped or lost. Some impulse or tendency was latent orpotential in the first unicellular life that rested not till iteventuated in each of these higher forms. Did any terrestrial orcelestial calamity endanger the line of descent of any of the highercreatures? Was any form cut off in the world-wide crustaldisturbances of the earth at the end of palaeozoic and mesozoictime, when so many forms of animal life appear to have been wipedout, that might in time have given birth to a kind unlike orsuperior to any now upon the earth? Species after species havebecome extinct, whole orders and families have gone out, oftenrather suddenly. Why we know not. Why the line of man's descent wasnot cut off, who knows? It is a vain speculation. There can belittle doubt that in early Tertiary times our ancestor was a small, feeble mammal, maybe of the lemur, maybe of the marsupial kind, powerless before the great carnivorous mammals of that time, andprobably escaping them by his greater agility, perhaps by hisarboreal habits. The ancestor of the horse was also a small creatureat that time, not larger than a fox. It was not cut off; the line ofdescent seems complete to the horse of our day. Small beginningsseem to be the rule in all provinces of life. There is little doubtthat the great animals of our day--the elephant, the whale, thelion, --all had their start in small forms. Many of these small formshave been found. But a complete series of any of the animal formsthat eventuated in any of the dominant species is yet wanting. It isquite certain that the huge, the gigantic, the monstrous in animal, as in vegetable life, lies far behind us. Is it not quite certainthat evolution in the life of the globe has run its course, and thatit will not again bring forth reptiles or mammals of the terribleproportions of those of past geologic ages? nor ferns, nor mosses, nor as gigantic trees as those of Carboniferous times? Probably theredwoods of the Far West, the gigantic sequoias, are the last raceof gigantic trees. The tide of life of the globe is undoubtedly atthe full. The flood has no doubt been checked many times. Theglacial periods, of which there seem to have been several indifferent parts of the earth, and in different geological periods, no doubt checked it when it occurred. But the tide as a whole musthave steadily risen, because the progression from lower to higherforms has gone steadily forward. The lower forms have come along;Nature has left nothing behind. The radiates, the articulates, themollusca, are still with us, but in the midst of these the higherand higher forms have been constantly appearing. The greatbiological tree has got its growth. Many branches and twigs havedied and dropped off, and many more will do so, are doing so beforeour eyes, but I cannot help doubting that any new branches ofimportance are yet to appear--any new families or orders of birds, or fishes, or reptiles, or mammals. The horse, the stag, the sheep, the dog, the cat, as we know them, are doubtless the end of theseries. One arrives at this conclusion upon general principles. Lifeas a whole must run its course or reach its high-water mark, thesame as life in its particular phases. Man has arrived and hasuniversal dominion; all things are put under his feet. The destinyof life upon the globe is henceforth largely in his hands. Not evenhe can avert the final cosmic catastrophe which physicists foresee, and which, according to Professor Lowell, the beings upon Mars arenow struggling to ward off. 

Man has taken his chances in the clash of forces of the physicaluniverse. No favor has been shown him, or is shown him to-day, andyet he has come to his estate. He has never been coddled; fire, water, frost, gravity, hunger, death, have made and still make noexceptions in his favor. He is on a level with all other animals inthis respect. He has his life and well-being on the same terms as dothe fowls of the air and the beasts of the fields. 

Archbishop Whately thought that primitive man could never haveraised himself to a higher condition without external aid--some"elementary instruction to enable his faculties to begin theirwork. " He must have had a boost. Well, the boost was forthcoming, but it was not from without, but from within, through this principleof development, this upward striving that was innate from the firstin certain forms of life and of which Whately had no conception. Itwas the conception of his time that creation was like a watch madeand wound up by some power external to itself. 

The physical evolution of man, as I have said, is no doubt complete. He will never have wings, or more legs, or longer arms, or a biggerbrain. The wings and the extra legs and the keener sense he has leftbehind him. His development henceforth must be in the mental andspiritual. He is bound to have more and more dominion over Nature, and see more and more clearly his own relation to her. He will intime completely subdue and possess the earth. Yes, and probablyexhaust her? But he will see in time that he is squandering hisinheritance and will mend his ways. He will conserve in the futureas he has wasted in the past. He will learn to conserve his ownhealth. He will banish disease; he will stamp out all the plaguesand scourges, through his scientific knowledge; he will double ortreble the length of life. Man has undoubtedly passed through andfinished certain phases of his emotional and mental development. Hewill never again be the religious enthusiast and fanatic he has beenin the past; he has not worshiped his last, but he has worshiped hisbest. He will build no more cathedrals; he will burn no more martyrsat the stake. His religion as such is on the wane. But hishumanitarianism is a rising tide. He is becoming less and less asavage, revolts more and more at the sight of blood and suffering. The highly religious ages were ages of blood and persecution. Man'stenderness for man has vastly increased. The sense of the sacrednessof human life has increased as his faith in his gods has declined. He has grown more human as he has grown less superstitious. Sciencehas atrophied his faith, but it has softened his heart. His fear ofNature has given place to love. Man never loved as he does now. Hehas withdrawn his gaze from heaven and fixed it upon the earth. Ashis interest in other worlds has diminished, his interest in thishas increased. As the angels have departed, the children have comein. 

When the nations, too, cease to be savage and selfish, and becomealtruistic, then the new birth of humanity will actually haveoccurred. As an artist and a creator of beautiful forms, man hasalso had his day; he loved the beautiful, the artistic, or theornamental long before he loved the true and the just. He was proudbefore he was kind; he was chivalrous before he was decent; he wastattooed before he was washed; he was painted before he was clothed;he built temples before he built a home; he sacrificed to his godsbefore he helped his neighbor; he was heroic before he wasself-denying; he was devout before he was charitable. We are losingthe savage virtues and vanities and growing in the grace of all thehumanities, and this process will doubtless go on, with manyinterruptions and setbacks of course, till the kingdom of love is atlast fairly established upon the earth. 

XI

THE PHANTOMS BEHIND US

I

I take the title of this paper from those great lines in Whitmanbeginning--

"Rise after rise bow the phantoms behind me"--

in which he launches in vivid imaginative form the whole doctrine ofevolution some years before Darwin had published his epoch-makingwork on the "Origin of Species. "

"I see afar down the huge first Nothing, and I know I was eventhere. "

I do not know that Whitman had any concrete belief in the truth ofthe animal origin of man. He read as picture and parable that whichthe man of science reads as demonstrable fact. He saw and felt thegreat truth of evolution, but he saw it as written in his own heartand not in the great stone book of the earth, and he saw it writtenlarge. He felt its cosmic truth, its truth in relation to the wholescheme of things; he felt his own kinship with all that lives, andhad a vivid personal sense of his debt to the past, not only ofhuman history, but also to the past of the earth and the spheres. And he felt this as a poet and not as a man of science. 

The theory of evolution as applied to the whole universe and itsinevitable corollary, the animal origin of man, is now wellestablished in most of the leading minds of the world, but it isstill rejected by many timid and sensitive souls, and it will be along time before it becomes universally accepted. 

Doubtless one source of the trouble we have in accepting the theorycomes from the fact that our minds have not been used to suchthoughts; in the mind of the race they are a new thing: they are notin the literature nor in the philosophy nor in the sacred books inwhich our minds have been nurtured; they are of yesterday; they cameto us raw and unhallowed by the usage of ages; more than that, theysavor of the materialism of all modern science, which is sodistasteful to our finer ideals and religious sensibilities. Infact, these ideas are strangers of an alien race in our intellectualhousehold, and we look upon them coldly and distrustfully. Butprobably to our children, or to our children's children, they willwear quite a different countenance; they will have become anaccepted part of the great family of ideas of the race. 

Another hindrance is the dullness and opacity of our own minds. Weare slow to wake up to a sense of the divinity that hedges us about. The great office of science has been to show us this universe asmuch more wonderful and divine than we have been wont to believe;shot through and through with celestial laws and forces; matter, indeed, but matter informed with spirit and intelligence; thecreative energy inherent and active in the ground underfoot not lessthan in the stars and nebulae overhead. 

We look for the divine afar off. We gaze upon the beauty and purityof the heavenly bodies without thinking that we are also in theheavens. We must open our minds to the stupendous fact that God isimmanent in his universe and that it is literally and exactly true, as we were taught long ago, that, during every moment of our lives, in Him we live and move and have our being. 

Moreover, we are staggered by the element of vast time that isimplied in the history of development. Were it not for the recordsin the rocks, we could not believe it at all. All the grandmovements and processes of nature are quite beyond our ken. In theheavens only the astronomer with his prisms and telescopes tracesthem; only the geologist and palaeontologist read their history inthe earth's crust. The soil we cultivate was once solid rock, butnot in one lifetime, not in many lifetimes, do we see thetransformation of the rocks into soil. Nations may rise and fall, and the rocks they looked upon and the soil they tilled remainpractically unchanged. Geologists talk about the ancient continentsthat have passed away. What an abyss of time such things open! Theytalk about the birth of a mountain or the decay of a mountain as wetalk of the birth and death of a man, but in doing so they reckonwith periods of time for which we have no standards of measurement. They walk and talk with the Eternal. To us the mountains seem asfixed as the stars. But the stars, too, are flitting. Look at Orionsome millions of years hence, and he will have been torn limb fromlimb. The combination of stars that forms that strikingconstellation and all other constellations is temporary as thegrouping of the clouds. The rise of man from the lower ordersimplies a scale of time almost as great. It is unintelligible to usbecause it belongs to a category of facts that transcends ourexperience and the experience of the race as the interstellar spacestranscend our earthly measurements. 

We now gaze upon the order below us across an impassable gulf, butthat gulf we have crossed and without any supernatural means oftransportation. We may say it has been bridged or filled with thehumble ancestral forms that carried forward the preciousevolutionary impulse of the vertebrate series till it culminated inman. All vestiges of that living bridge are now gone, and the legendof our crossing seems like a dream or a miracle. Biologicalevolution has gone hand in hand with geological evolution, and bothare on a scale of time of which our hour-glass of the centuriesgives us but a faint hint. Our notions of time are not formed on thepattern of the cosmic processes, or the geologic processes, or theevolutionary processes; they are formed on the pattern of our ownbrief span of life. In a few cases in the familiar life about us wesee the evolutionary process abridged, and transformations likethose of unrecorded time take place before our eyes, as when thetadpole becomes the frog or the grub becomes the butterfly. Theserapid changes are analogous to those which in the depths of geologictime have evolved the bird from the fish or the reptile, or the sealand the manatee from a fourfooted land animal. Our common bluebirdhas long been recognized as a descendant of the thrush family; thisorigin is evident in the speckled breast of the young birds and inthe voices of the mature birds. I have heard a bluebird with anunmistakable thrush note. The transformation has doubtless been soslow that an analogous change taking place in any of the bird formsof our own time would entirely escape observation. The bluebird mayhave been as long in getting his blue coat as man has been ingetting his upright position. 

Looking into the laws and processes of the common nature about usfor clues to the origin of man is not unlike looking into therecords of the phonograph for the secret of the music which thatwonderful instrument voices for us. Something, some active principleor agent, has to invoke the music that slumbers or is latent inthese lines. 

In like manner some principle or force that we do not see is activein the ground underfoot and in the forms of life about us which isthe final secret of the origin of man and of all other creatures. This something is the evolutionary impulse, this innate aspirationof living matter to reach higher and higher forms. "Urge and urge, "says Whitman, "always the procreant urge of the world. " It is inEmerson's worm "striving to be man. " This "striving" pervadesorganic nature. Whence its origin science does not assume to say. [Footnote: This passage was written long before I had read Bergson'sCreative Evolution, as were several others of the same import inthis volume. ]

Then the difference in kind between the mind of man and that of thelower orders makes evolution a doubly hard problem. 

Look over the globe and see what a gulf separates man from all othercreatures. All the other animals seem akin--as if the product of thesame workman. Man, in contrast, seems like an introduction from someother sphere or the outcome of quite other psychological laws; hisdominion over them all is so complete and universal. Without theirspecialization of structure or powers, he yet masters them all anduses them; without their powers of speed, he yet outstrips them;without their strength of tusk and limb, he yet subdues them;without their inerrant instinct, he yet outwits them; without theirkeenness of eye, ear, and nose, he yet wins in the chase; withouttheir special adaptation to environment, he survives when theyperish. A man is marked off from the animals below him, I say, as ifhe were a being of another sphere. He looks into their eyes and theyinto his, and no recognition passes; and yet we have to believe thathe and they are fruit of the same biologic tree and that their stemforms unite in the same trunk somewhere in the abyss of biologictime. 

The rise of man from the lower orders taxes our powers of belief andour faith in the divinity that lurks underfoot far more than did thespecial creation myth. Creation by omnipotent fiat seems easy whenyou have the omnipotent being to begin with, but creation throughevolution is a kind of cosmic or biologic legerdemain that bafflesand bewilders us. It so far transcends all our earthly knowledge andexperience and all the flights of our philosophy that we standspeechless before it. It opens a gulf that the imagination cannotclear; it opens vistas from which we instinctively shrink; it opensup abysms of time in which our whole historic period would be but aday; it opens up a world of struggle, delay, waste, failure thatpalls the imagination. It challenges our faith in the immanency andin the ceaseless activity of God in his world; it brings thecreative energy down from its celestial abode and clothes it withthe flesh and blood of animal life. It may chill and shock us; itshows us that we are of the earth earthy; yea, that we are of theanimal beastly; it presses us down in matter; it puts out the lightsto which we have so long turned as lighting our origin; the words"sacred, " "divine, " "holy, " and "celestial, " as applied to ourorigin and development, we have no longer any use for, nor for anywords or ideas that set us apart from the rest of creation--above itin our origin or apart from it in our relations. The atmosphere ofmystery and miracle and sanctity that our religious training hasthrown around our introduction upon this planet and around ourrelations and destiny science dispels. Our language and many of ourideas and habits of thought date back to pre-scientific times--whenthere were two worlds, the heavenly and the earthly, separated by agulf. Now we know that the two worlds are one, that they areinseparably blended; that the celestial and the terrestrial areunder the same law; that we can never be any more in the heavensthan we are here and now, nor any nearer the final sources of lifeand power; that the divine is underfoot as well as overhead; that weare part and parcel of the physical universe, and take our chancesin the cosmic processes the same as the rest, and draw upon the samefund of animal life that the other creatures do. We are identifiedwith the worm underfoot no less than with the stars overhead. We arenot degraded by such a thought, but the whole of creation is liftedup. Our minds and bodies are not less divine, but all things aremore divine. We have to gird up our loins and try to summon strengthto see this tremendous universe as it is, alive and divine to thelast particle and embosomed in the Infinite. 

II

Evolution is not the final explanation of the universe, but it isprobably the largest generalization of the modern mind. Science hasto start somewhere, and it starts with the universe as it finds itand seeks to trace secondary or proximate causes; the evolutionistseeks to trace the footsteps of creative energy in the world ofanimal life. How did God make man? Out of the dust of the earth, says the Bible of our fathers. The evolutionist teaches essentiallythe same thing, only he does not abridge the process as thecatechism has abridged it for us; he would fain unfold the wholelong road that man has traveled from the first protozoic cell to thevast communities of cells that now make up his physical life. Hewould show how man has risen on stepping-stones of his dead self. These stepping-stones have been the animal forms below him. In themand through them something, some impulse, some force, has mountedand mounted through all the enormous lapse of geologic time. Inimagination we see the dim, shadowy man, restless and struggling ina vast number of earlier forms. He has struggled upward through theinvertebrates, through the fish, through the reptile, through thelower mammals, through his simian ancestors till he reaches his goalin the man we know. 

Darwin was not the author of the theory of evolution, but he madethe theory alive and real to the imagination. He showed us what amaster key it is for unlocking the riddle of the life of the globe. He launched biological science upon a new career and made it worthyof its place in the great trilogy of sciences, astronomy, geology, and biology, of which Tennyson, in his poem "Parnassus, " recognizedonly the first two. Had Tennyson written his poem in our day hewould undoubtedly have included biology among his "terrible Muses"that tower above all others, eclipsing the glory of the great poets. Or is it true that we find it easier to accept the theory of theevolution of the worlds and suns from nebulous matter than to acceptthe theory of the evolution of man from the maze of the lower animalforms? It is less personal to us. The astronomer has the advantageof the biologist in one important respect: he can show us in theheavens now the process of the evolution of worlds actually goingon, but the biologist cannot show us the transformation of onespecies into another taking place to-day. We can sound the abyssesof astronomic space easier than we can sound the abysses of geologictime. The stars and the nebulae we have always with us, but whereare the myriad earlier forms that were the antecedents of thepresent animal life of the globe? True, the palaeontologist finds amore or less disjointed record of them in the stratified rocks andsees in a measure the course evolution has taken, but he does notactually see it at work as does the astronomer. More than that, theforces the astronomer deals with are mechanical and chemical, butthe biologist deals with a new force called life that often reversesor defies mechanical and chemical forces, but which is yet soidentified and blended with them that we cannot conceive it apartfrom them. The stomach does not digest itself, nor gravity hold theblood in the lower extremities. The tree lifts up its weight offluids and solids and holds aloft its fruit and foliage in spite ofgravity; its growing roots split and lift the rocks; mosses andlichens disintegrate granite; vital energy triumphs over chemicaland mechanical energy. 

Biological laws are much more subtle and difficult to trace andformulate than chemical and mechanical laws. Hence the student oforganic evolution can rarely arrive at the demonstrable certaintiesin this field that he can in the sphere of chemistry and mechanics. It is very doubtful if life can ever be explained in terms of thesethings. Life works through chemical combinations and affinities, andyet is it not more than chemistry? It works with and throughmechanical principles and forces, and yet it is evidently more thanmechanics. It is manifested through matter, and yet no analysis ofmatter can reveal its secret. It comes and goes while matter stays;we destroy life, but cannot destroy matter. It is as fugitive as thewind which fills all sails one minute and is gone the next. Itavails itself of fluids and gases and the laws which govern them, but fluids and gases do not explain it. It waits upon the rains andthe dews, but it is more than they are; it follows in the footstepsof the decay and disintegration of the inorganic, and yet it is notthe gift of these things; it transforms the face of the earth, andyet the earth has been and will be when it was not and when it willnot be. Through his knowledge and his science man performs wondersevery day; he can reduce mountains to powder and seas to dry land, but he cannot create or start de novo the least throb of life. Atleast, he has not yet done so. With all his vast resources ofmechanics and chemistry, and his insight into the mechanism of theuniverse, he has not yet made the least particle of inorganic matterthrill with the mysterious something we call life. 

There must have been a time when life was not upon the earth andthere must again come a time when it will not be. It has probablyvanished from the moon and all inferior planets, and it has not yetcome to the superior planets, except maybe to Mars. It must be andmust have always been potential in matter, but this fact leaves themystery as profound as ever. 

Yet if the artificial production of life were to happen to-day--ifin some of our laboratories living matter were produced fromnon-living, should we not still have to credit the event to somemysterious potency residing in matter itself? If by a lucky strokeman were to evoke the organic from the inorganic, be assured hewould not evoke something from nothing, or add anything to thelatent possibilities of the elements with which he works. Does notthe question still remain who or what made this feat possible? Onedare affirm that man cannot create life de novo any more than he cancreate matter. He may yet evoke life as he evokes the spark from theflint and the flame from the match or as he evokes force from thefood he eats. In this latter case he does not create the force; heliberates it through the vital forces of his body. The spark fromthe flint and the flame from the match were called forth by amechanical process, but the process was set going by the will whichwaits upon the vital process. The body with all its many functionsis a complicated system of mechanical devices and chemicalprocesses, but that which is back of all and governs all is notmechanical; the body is a machine plus something else. 

The chemist or biologist who shall produce a speck of protoplasmto-day will have the credit of unlocking a power in inorganicnature; he will prove by a short cut how immanent the creativeenergy or the vital force of the universe is in matter. He will nothave eliminated the creative energy; he will only have disclosed itand availed himself of it. 

We behold spontaneous combustion, a fire self-kindled, but we donot see the activity of the particles of matter that preceded it orpenetrate the secret of their mysterious affinities. The fire waspotential there in the very constitution of the elements. We floutat miracles, and then we disclose an unending miracle in the lifeabout us. 

All the life upon the globe, including man with all his marvelouspowers, surely originated upon the globe, surely arose out of thenon-living and the non-thinking, not by the fiat of some powerexternal to nature, but through the creative energy inherent innature and ever active there. The great physical instrumentality washeat--without heat the reaction called life could never have takenplace. This fact has led a French biologist to say that life is onlya surface accident in the history of the thermic evolution of theglobe. Without the disintegration of the rocks and the formation ofthe soil and the precipitation of watery vapor, which was indirectlythe work of heat, the vegetable and the animal could not havedeveloped. If we succeed in proving that all these things are ofchemico-mechanical origin, we still want to know who or whatinstituted these chemical and mechanical powers and the laws thatgovern them. Creation by chemistry and mechanics is as mysterious ascreation by miracle. We must still have a creator, while we can donothing with him nor find any place for him in an endless, beginningless, infinite series of events. So there we are. We go outof the same door by which we came in. 

When all life vanishes from the earth, as it will when the conditionof heat and moisture has radically changed, and eternalrefrigeration sets in--what then? The potencies of matter will nothave changed and life will reappear and go through its cycle againon some other sphere. 

Life began upon this earth not by miracle in the old sense, but bymiracle in the new scientific sense--by the immanence and ceaselessactivity of the creative energy in the physical world about us--inthe sunbeam, in the rains, in the snows, in the air currents, and inthe soil underfoot; in oxygen, hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, in lime, iron, silex, phosphorus, and in all the rest of them. Each has itslaws, its ways, its fixed mode of procedure, its affinities, itslikes and dislikes, and life is bound up with all of them. If wehypothesize the ether to explain certain phenomena, why should wenot hypothesize a vital force to account for other mysteries?

The inorganic passes into the organic as night passes into day. Where does one end and the other begin? No man can tell. There is nobeginning and no ending of either, and yet night comes and goes andday comes and goes--a constant becoming and a constant ending. Weare probably in the midday of the life of the globe--life huge andrank and riotous--the youth of life has passed, life more sedate andaspiring and spiritual has come. The gigantic has gone or is going, the huge monsters of the sea and of the land have had their day, manappears at the end of the series of lesser but more complete forms. 

Many intelligent persons who have been rocked in the cradle of theold creeds still look upon evolution as a godless doctrine andaccuse it of vulgarizing high and sacred things. This state of mindcan only be slowly outgrown by familiarizing ourselves with theprocesses of nature or of the creative energy in the world of lifeand matter about us; with our own origin in the low fishlike orapelike creature in the maternal womb; with the development of everyplant, tree, and animal from a microscopic germ; with the unbrokensequence of natural law; with the waste, the delays, the pains, thefailures on every hand; with the impersonal and the impartialcharacter of all the physical forces; with the transformations andmetamorphoses that marked the course of animal life; and, above all, with the thought that evolution is not self-caused or in any truesense a cause in itself, but the instrument or plan of the powerthat works in and through all things. The ways of God in all thesedetails are past finding out, but science watches the unfolding of abud, the development of a grain of wheat, the growth of the humanembryo, the succession of life-forms upon the globe as revealed inthe records of the stratified rocks, or observes in the heavens thecondensation of nebulous matter into suns and systems, and it saysthis is one of his ways. Evolution--an endless unfolding andtransformation. "Urge and urge and urge, " says Whitman (I love torepeat this saying; it is so significant), "always the procreanturge of the world. " Always the labor and travail pains of theuniverse to bring forth higher forms; always struggle and pain andfailure and death, but always a new birth and an upward reach. 

Strike out the element of time and we see evolution as the greatprestidigitator of the biologic ages. The creative energymanipulates a fish and it turns into a reptile; it covers a molluskas with a vapor and behold, a backboned creature instead! Now we seea little creature no larger than a fox and when we look again, behold the horse; a wolf or some kindred animal is plunged into thewater, and behold, the seal! Some small creature of the lemur kindis covered with a capacious hand, and we look again, and behold man!We have only to minimize time and minimize space to see theimpossible happening all about us or to see the Mosaic account ofcreation repeated; we have only the clay and water to begin with, when, presto! behold what we have now! We see the rocks covered withverdure, the mountains vanishing into plains, the valleys changinginto hills or the plains changing into mountains, tropic landscovered with ice and snow. 

Lord Salisbury thought he had discredited natural selection, whichis one of the feet upon which evolution goes, when he charged thatno one had ever seen it at work. We have not seen it at work becauseour little span of life is too short. Only the palaeontologisttraces in the records of the rocks the footsteps of this god ofchange. And rarely if ever does he find a continuous and completerecord--only a footprint here and there, but he sees the directionin which they are going and many of the places where the travelertarried. The palaeontologist, that detective of the rocks, works uphis case with the same thoroughness and caution and the same powerof observation as does the detective in human affairs and with agreater sweep of scientific imagination. 

An agent of evolution is the influence of the environment, but whosees the environment set its stamp upon animal life? After manygenerations we may see the accumulated results. In a few instancesthe results are rapid. Thus sheep lose their wool in tropicalclimates and a northern fur-bearing animal its fur. The well-beingof the animal demands this change, and demands it quickly. Fish losetheir sense of sight in underground streams; this loss is not sovital and it comes about much more slowly. A tropical climate setsits stamp upon the complexion and character of man, but this againis a slow process, as the same stress of necessity does not exist. 

In the tendency to variation--in form, size, disposition, power, fertility--man differs from all other animals. In the same race, inthe same family, we find infinitely varied types. Among the wildcreatures all the individuals of a species are practically alike. Wecan hardly tell one fox, or one marmot, or one chipmunk, or onecrow, or one hawk, or one black duck from another of the samespecies. Of course there are slight individual differences, but theyare hardly distinguishable. Among the insects, one bee, one beetle, one ant, one butterfly seems the exact copy of every otherindividual of its kind. The law of variation seems practicallyannulled in the insect world. 

It is the wide and free range of this law in the human species thathas undoubtedly led to the great progress of the race. There hasbeen no dead level--no democracy of talent--no equality of gifts, but only equality of opportunity. Men differ from one another intheir mental endowments, capacities, and dispositions vastly morethan do any other creatures upon the earth. This difference makesman's chances of progress so much the greater; he has so many morestakes in the game. If one type of talent fails, another type maywin; if the lymphatic temperament is not a success, try the sanguineor the bilious; blue eyes and black eyes and brown eyes will winmore triumphs than blue or black or brown alone. Arms or legs extralong, sight or hearing extra sharp, wit extra keen, judgment extrasure--all these things open doors to more progress. Variation givesnatural selection a chance to take hold, and where the struggle forlife is the most severe the changes will be the most rapid and themost radical. Without the pressure of the environment naturalselection would not select. The tendency to physical variation inman is probably no greater than in other creatures, but his tendencyto mental variation is enormous. He varies daily from mediocrity togenius, hence the enormous range of his chances of progress. Fromthe first variation that started him on his way in his line ofdescent, variation must have been more and more active till hevaried in the direction of reason, long before the dawn of history, since which time his progress has been by rapid strides--and moreand more rapid till we see his leaps forward in recent times. Therace owes its rapid progress to its exceptional men, its men ofgenius and power, and these have often been like sports or thesudden result of mutations--a man like Lincoln springing from thehumblest parentage. No such extreme variations are seen in any ofthe lower orders. Indeed, in one's lifetime one sees but very slightvariation in any of the wild or domestic creatures, less in the wildthan in the domestic because they are less under the influence ofthat most variable of animals, man. And man's variations are mainlymental and not physical. The higher we go in the scale of powers, the greater the variation and hence the more rapid the evolution. Probably man's body has not changed radically in vast cycles oftime, but his mind has developed enormously since the dawn ofhistory. 

IV

Biologists are coming more and more to recognize some unknown factorin evolution, probably some unknowable factor. The four factors ofOsborn--heredity, ontogeny, environment, selection--play upon andmodify endlessly the new form when it is started, but what about theoriginal start? Whence comes this inborn momentum, this evolutionarysend-off? What or who set the whole grand process going?

Bergson sees an internal psychological principle of development, hence the name of his book, "Creative Evolution. " Osborn uses theword "directed. " Certain characters, he says, are adaptive or suitedto their purpose from the start; they do not have to be fitted totheir place by natural selection. Huxley uses the word"predestined"--all the life of the globe and all the starry hosts ofheaven are working out in boundless space and in endless time "theirpredestined course of evolution. " Darwin must have had in mind thesame mysterious something when he said that man had risen to thevery summit of the animal scale, but not through his own exertions. Not by his own will or exertion, surely, any more than the embryo inits mother's womb develops into the full-grown child by its ownexertion or than our temperaments and complexions and statures arematters of our own wills and choice. Something greater than man andbefore him, to which he sustains the relation that the unborn childsustains to its mother, must enter into our thought of his originand development. 

The great evolutionists have been very cautious about seeking to gobehind evolution and name the Primal Cause. In such an attemptscience would at once be beyond soundings. Darwin and Huxley werereverent, truth-loving men, but they hesitated as men of science toput themselves in a position where no step could be taken. 

Slowly man emerges out of the abyss of geologic time into the dawnof history, and science gropes about like a man feeling his way inthe dark or, at most, by the aid now and then of a dim flash oflight, to trace the path he has come. He has surely arrived, and weare, I believe, safe in saying he has come by the way of the lowerorders; but the precise forms through which he has come, the housesin which he has tarried by the way, and all the adventures andvicissitudes that befell him on the journey--can we ever hope toknow these things? In any case, man has his antecedents; life hasits antecedents; every beat of one's heart has its antecedent cause, which again has its antecedent. We can thus traverse the chain ofcausation only to find it is an endless chain; the separate links wecan examine, but the first link or the last we see, by the verynature of things, and the laws of our own minds, must forever eludeus. Science cannot admit of a break in the chain of causation, cannot admit that miracles or the supernatural in the old sense, asexternal and arbitrary interference with the natural order, can playor ever have played any part in this universe. Yet science has topostulate a First Cause when it knows, or metaphysics knows for it, that with the Infinite there can be no first and no last, nobeginning and no ending, only endless succession. 

To science man is not a fallen creature, but a many times risencreature and all the good of the universe centres in him. The mindthat pervades all nature and is active in plant and animal alikefirst comes to know itself and regard itself and achieveintellectual appreciation in man. While all nature below man is wiseonly to its own ends and goes its appointed way as void ofself-consciousness as the stone that falls or the wind that blows, the mind of man attains to disinterested wisdom and turns uponitself and upon the universe the power of objective thought; italone achieves understanding. 

In our studies of life and of the universe as soon as we begin tobridge chasms by an appeal to the miraculous, or to theextra-natural powers, we are traitors to the scientific spirit whichwe seek to serve. There are many things that science cannot explain. Perhaps I may say that it cannot give the ultimate explanation ofanything. It can do little more than tell us of the action, theinteraction, and the reaction of things, but of the thingsthemselves, their origin and ultimate nature, or the source of thelaws that govern them, what does it or what can it know?

Man is the heir of all the geologic ages; he inherits the earthafter countless generations of animals and plants, and thebeneficent forces of wind and rain, air and sky, have in the courseof millions of years prepared it for him. His body has been builtfor him through the lives and struggles of the countless beings whoare in the line of his long descent; his mind is equally anaccumulated inheritance of the mental growth of the myriads ofthinking men and unthinking animals that went before him. In theforms of his humbler forebears he has himself lived and died myriadsof times to make ready the soil that nurses and sustains him to-day. He is a debtor to Cambrian and Silurian times, to the dragons andsaurians and mastodons that have roamed over the earth. Indeed, whatis there or has there been in the universe that he is not indebtedto? The remotest star that shines has sent a ray that has enteredinto his life. All things are under his feet, and the keys of theheavens are in his hands. 

V

One would fain arrive at some concrete belief or image of his lineof descent in geologic time as he does in the historic period. Buthow hard it is to do so! Can we form any mental picture of theactual animal forms that the manward impulse has traveled through?With all the light that palaeontology throws upon the animal life ofthe past, can we see where amid the revel of these bizarre forms ourancestor hid himself? Can we see him as a reptile in the slime ofthe jungle or in the waters of the Mesozoic world? What was he likeor what akin to? What mark or sign was there upon him at that timeof the future that was before him? Can we see him as a fish in theold Devonian seas or lakes? Was he a big fish or a little fish? Theprimitive fishes were mostly of the shark kind. Is there anyconnection between that fact and the human sharks of to-day? Muchless can one picture to one's self what his ancestor was like in theage of the invertebrates, amid the trilobites, etc. , of the earlierPalaeozoic seas. But we must go back even earlier than that, back tounicellular life and to original protoplasm, and finally back tofiery nebulous matter. What can we make of it all by way of concreteconception of what actually took place--of the visible, eating, warring, breeding animal forms in whose safekeeping our heritagelay? Nothing. We are not merely at sea, we are in abysmal depths, and the darkness is so thick we can cut it. 

We meet the same difficulty when we try to figure to ourselves theline of descent of any of the animal forms of to-day. How did theyescape the world-wild catastrophe of earlier geologic times? Ordid the creative impulse bank upon life as a whole and never becomebankrupt, no matter what special lines or forms failed?

The first appearance of the primates is in Eocene times and theanthropoid apes in the Miocene, probably five millions of years ago. The form which may have been in our line of descent, theDryopithecus, later appears to have become extinct. Did our fatehang upon the success of any of these forms? The monkeys andanthropoid apes appeared at the same time in different countries. Nature seems to have been making preliminary studies of man in thesevarious forms, but when and where she hit upon the form that sheperfected in man, who knows?

The horse appears to have been evolved in North America, true cattlein Asia, elephants in Africa. Can we narrow their line of descentdown to a single pair for each? Many forms allied to the horseappeared in Europe and Asia in Miocene times. We find monkeys indifferent parts of the world in the same geologic horizons; did theyall have a common origin?

Life's apprenticeship has been a long one. The earlier forms ofvertebrate life were very large; later they became very small. Nature seems to have experimented with bulk, as if she thought sizewould win in the race. Hence those huge uncouth forms among thereptiles and early mammals. The scheme did not work well; bulk wasnot the thing, after all. Most of the gigantic forms became extinct. Then she tried smaller and more agile forms with larger brains--lessflesh and more wit. On this line Nature continued to work till sheproduced her masterpiece in man--a rather feeble and nearlyweaponless animal, but with an intangible armory of weapons andtools in his brain that enables him to put all creatures under hisfeet. 

XII

THE HAZARDS OF THE PAST

I

Bergson, the new French philosopher, thinks we all had a narrowescape, back in geologic time, of having our eggs spoiled beforethey were hatched, or, rather, rendered incapable of hatching by toothick a shell. This was owing to the voracity of the earlyorganisms. As they became more and more mobile, they began to takeon thick armors and breastplates and shells and calcareous skins toprotect themselves from one another. This tendency resulted, hethinks, in the arrest of the entire animal world in its evolutiontoward higher and higher forms. These shells and armors begat a kindof torpor and immobility which has continued down to our day withthe echinoderms and mollusks, but the arthropods and vertebratesescaped it by some lucky stroke. Now you and I are here withoutimprisoning shells on our backs; but how or why did we escape?Bergson does not say. Was it a matter of luck or chance? Was thereever a time when the stream of life tended to harden and becomefixed in its own forms like a stream of cooling lava, or has theinnate plasticity of life been easily equal to its own ends? True, the clam remains a clam, and the starfish remains a starfish; someother forms have carried the evolutionary impulse forward till itflowered in man. Was this impulse ever really checked or endangered?Was the golden secret ever intrusted to the keeping of any singleform? and, had that form been cut off, would the earth have beenstill without its man? These are puzzling questions. 

Thus, when we have come to look upon life and nature in the light ofevolution, what vistas are opened to us where before were only blankwalls! The geologic ages take on a new interest to us. We know thatin some form we were even there. The systems of sedimentary rockswhich the geologist portrays, piled one upon the other to a depth offifty miles or more, seem like the stairway by which we haveascended, taking on some new and more developed form at each rise. What we were at the first step in Cambrian times only the Lordknows, but whatever we were, we crept up or floated up to the nextrise. In the Silurian seas we may have been a trilobite for aught weknow; at any rate, we were the outcome of the life impulse thatbegat the trilobites, but our fate was not bound up with theirs, astheir race came to an end in those early geologic ages, and our stemform did not. Whether or not we were a fish in the Devonian seas, there is little doubt that we had gills, because we have the gillslits yet in our early foetal life, and it is quite certain that insome way we owe our backbones to the fishes. 

When the rocks that form my native Catskills were being laid down inthe Devonian waters, I fancy that my aquatic embryo was swimmingabout somewhere and slowly waxing strong. Up and up I climbed acrossthe sandstone steps, across the limestone, the conglomerate, theslate, up into Carboniferous times. The upper and nether millstonesof the "millstone grit" did not crush me, neither did the floods andthe convulsions of Carboniferous times that buried the vastvegetable growths that resulted in our coal measures engulf ordestroy me. About that time probably, I emerged from the water andbecame an amphibian, and maybe got my five fingers and five toes oneach side. 

Nor did the wholesale destruction of animal life at the end ofPalaeozoic time cut off my line of descent. The monstrous reptilesof the succeeding or Mesozoic age, the petrified remains of one ofwhich was recently found in the sandstone rocks near the river'sedge under the Palisades of the Hudson, do not seem to haveendangered the golden thread by which our fate hung. Still "I mountand mount. " The stairs by which I climb were rent by earthquakes andvolcanoes, the strata were squeezed up and overturned and folded inthe great mountain-chains; the Alps, the Andes, the Himalayas, theCoast Range were born; the earth-throes must have been tremendous attimes; yet I escaped it all. The huge and fearful mammals of thethird or Tertiary period passed me by unharmed. Eruptions andcataclysms, the sinking of the land, the inundations of the sea, world-wide deformations of the earth's crust, fire and ice andfloods, monsters of the deep and dragons of the land and the airhave beset my course from the first, and yet here I am, here we allare, and apparently none the worse for the appalling dangers we havepassed through. 

Evolution thus makes the world over for us. It shows us in what acomplex web of vital and far-reaching relations we stand. It givesus an outlook upon the past that is startling, and in some waysforbidding, yet one that ought to be stimulating and inspiring. Ifwe look back with a shudder we should look forward with a thrill. Ifthe past is terrible, the future is in the same degree cheering andinviting. If we came out of those lowly and groveling forms, towhat heights of being may we not be carried by the impetus thatbrought us thus far? In fact, to what heights has it already carriedus!

II

That the hazards of the past, to many forms of life, at least, havebeen real and no myth, is evident from the vast number of forms thathave been cut off and become extinct; various causes, now hard todecipher, have worked together to the end, such as changedgeographical conditions, changes of climate, affecting thefood-supply, extreme specialization, like that of the sabre-toothedtiger whose petrified remains have been found in various parts ofthis continent, and who apparently was finally handicapped by hishuge dental sabre. Probably many more species of animals have becomeextinct than have survived, but none of these could have been in theline of man's descent, else the human race would not have been here. If the Eocene progenitor of the horse, the little four-toedeohippus, had been cut off, would not the world have been horselessto-day? The horse in America became extinct, from some cause onlyconjectural, many tens of thousands of years ago. Had the same fatebefallen the horse in Europe and Asia, it seems probable that ourcivilization would have been far less advanced to-day than it is. 

The fate of every species of mammal in our time seems to have beenin the keeping of a single form in early Tertiary times. The end ofthe Cretaceous or chalk period saw the extinction of the giantreptiles both of sea and of land, at the same time that it saw theappearance of a great many species of small and inconspicuousmammals, among which doubtless were our own humble forebears. Extreme specialization in any direction may narrow an animal'schances of survival; they have but one chance in the game of life, whereas an animal with a more generalized organization has manychances. Man is one of the most generalized of animals; no specialtools, no special weapons--his hand many tools and weapons in one. Hence he is the most adaptable of animals; all climes, all foods, all places are his; he is master of the land, of the sea, of theair. 

Animal life is often curiously interdependent. I asked our guide inthe Adirondacks if there were any ravens there. "Not nearly as manyas there used to be, " he said, and his explanation of theirdisappearance seems thoroughly scientific; it was that the wolvesand the panthers kept them in meat, and now that these animals haddisappeared, the ravens had little to feed upon. If the moose werecompelled to graze from off the ground, like a sheep or a cow, thespecies would probably soon become extinct. Osborn thinks itprobable that the huge beast called titanothere finally becameextinct early in Tertiary times owing to the form of its teeth, which were of such a type that they could not change to meet achange in the flora upon which the creature fed. Of course we shallnever know what narrow escapes our race had from extinction in theremote past; some forms have ended in a blind alley, like thesea-urchin and the oyster. Arthropoda have continued to evolve andhave reached their high-water mark of intelligence in bees andants. The vertebrates went forward and have culminated in man. Bergson thinks that in the vertebrates intelligence has beendeveloped at the expense of instinct, and that in the invertebratesinstinct has been perfected at the expense of intelligence. 

Are we not compelled to adopt what is called the monophyletichypothesis, that is, that our line of descent started from one pair, male and female, somewhere in the vast stretch of geologic orbiologic time, and to reason that, had that pair been out of therace, we should not have appeared?

Can we narrow life to a single point, a single cell, in the past?Was there one and only one first bit of protoplasm? If we were tosay that life first appeared on the globe in Cambrian times, justwhat should we mean? That it began as a single point, or as manypoints? When we say that the primates first appeared in Eocenetimes, do we mean that one single primate appeared then? If so, whatform went immediately before him? This is all a vain speculation. 

Does man presuppose all the vertebrate sub-kingdom? Was he safe aslong as one vertebrate form remained? Are his forebears many, andnot one pair? Can we think of his ancestry under the image of atree, and of him as one of the many branches? If so, nothing but thedestruction of the tree would have imperiled his appearance, or thelopping off of his particular branch. Probably all such images aremisleading. We simply cannot figure to ourselves the tangled courseof our biological descent. If thwartings and accidents arid delayscould have cut man off, how could he have escaped? We cannot thinkof man as one; we are compelled to think of him as many; and yet inall our experience the many come from the one, or the one pair. 

How thick the field of animal life in the past is strewn withextinct forms!--as thick as the sidereal spaces are strewn with thefragments of wrecked worlds! But other worlds and suns are spun outof the wrecked worlds and suns through the process of cosmicevolution. The world-stuff is worked over and over. Extinct animalforms must have given rise to other, allied forms before theyperished, and these to still others, and so on down to our time. 

The image of a tree is misleading from the fact that all thedifferent branches of the animal kingdom, from the protozoa up toman, have come along with what we call the higher branches, themammals; the suckers have kept pace with the main stalk, so that wehave the image of a sheaf of branches starting from a common originand all of equal length. Man has brought on his relations along withhim. 

There is no glamour of romance over that past. It was all hard, prosy, terrible fact. The earth's crust was less stable than now, the upheavals and subsidences and earthquakes more frequent, thewarring of the elements more fierce and incessant, deluge andinundation in more rapid succession, and the riot and excesses ofanimal life far beyond anything we know of. And our line of descentwas taking its chances amid it all. The widespread blotting out oflife at the end of Palaeozoic time, and again at the end of Mesozoictimes, when myriads of forms were cut off, probably from someconvulsion of nature or some cosmic catastrophe; and again duringthe ice age, when the camel, the llama, the horse, the tapir, themastodon, the elephant, the giant sloth, became extinct in NorthAmerica--how fared it with our ancestor during these terrible ages?There is no sure trace of him till late Tertiary times, and it isprobably not more than two hundred thousand years ago that heassumed the upright attitude and began to use tools. Probably inEurope fifty thousand years ago he was living in caves, clothed inskins, contending with the cave bear and cave lion, using rude stoneimplements, and hunting the hairy mastodon, etc. In Asia theprobabilities are that he was farther on the road toward the dawn ofhistory. 

We may think of our descent in the historic period under the imageof the stream, though of a stream many times delayed and diverted, even many times diminished by wars and plagues and famine, but astream with some sort of unity and continuity, since man became man. The stream of life is like any other stream in this respect. Divertor use up part of the water of a stream, yet what is left flows onand keeps up the continuity and identity of the stream; dip your cupinto it here, and you will not get precisely the same water youwould have got had none of it been diverted or used far back in itscourse--you get the water that was allowed to flow by. 

Had there been no loss of life by war and pestilence and accidentsof various kinds, the different countries would have been occupiedby quite other men and women than those that fill them to-day. Thecourse of life in every neighborhood is changed by what seem likeaccidental causes, as when a family is practically wiped out by someaccident or dread disease. This brings new people on the scene. Thefarm or the business falls into other hands, and new socialrelations spring up, new men and women are brought together or theold ones driven apart, marriage is hastened or retarded, opportunities for family life are made or unmade, and fewerchildren, or more children, as the case may be, are the result. Theissue of some battle hundreds or thousands of years ago may haveplayed a part in your life and mine to-day--other races, otherindividuals of the race, would have been thrown together had theissue been different, and other families started, so that some oneelse would have been here in our stead. 

But the question of hazard to the race of man in geologic time isquite a different one. Here our fate seems to hang by a singlethread--a golden thread, we may call it, but, in that terrible mazeof clashing forces and devouring forms of the vast geologic periods, how liable to be broken! It is not now a question of the continuityof a stream, but of the continuity of a single evolutionary process, or, as Haeckel says, the continuity of the morphological chain whichstretches from the lemurs up through tailed and tailless anthropoidapes to man. If the evolutionary impulse had been checked orextinguished in the lemur--that small apelike animal that wentbefore the true ape, the fossil remains of which have been found onthis continent and the survivals of which are now found inMadagascar--would man have appeared? Again, if the race of lemursdeveloped from a single pair, how precarious seems our fate! Infact, if any of the transitional forms between species can bereduced to a single pair--as the forms that connect the reptileswith the mammals--our fate would seem to be in the keeping of theseforms. Over this single frail bridge which escaped the floods andthe tornadoes and the earthquakes of those terrible ages we musthave passed. What risky business it all seems! Was it luck or lawthat favored us? Doubtless, if we could penetrate the mystery, weshould see that there was no chance or risk in the matter. We cannotgo very far in solving these great fundamental questions by applyingto them the tests of our own experience, Numberless specific formsbecome extinct, but the impulse that begat the form does not dieout. Thus, all the giant reptiles died out--the dinosaurs, themesosaurs--but the reptilian impulse still survives. How many typesof invertebrates have perished! but the invertebrate impulse stillgoes on. How many species of mammals have been cut off! yet themammal impulse has steadily gone forward. These things suggest thewave that moves on but leaves the water behind. The vertebrateimpulse began in wormlike forms, in the old Palaeozoic seas, andstopped not till it culminated in man. This impulse has left manyforms behind it; but has this impulse itself ever been endangered?If one looks at the matter thus in an abstract instead of a concreteway, the problem of our descent becomes easier. 

When we look at the evolution of life on a grand scale, nature seemsto feel her way, like a blind man, groping, hesitating, trying thisroad and then that. In some cases the line of evolution seems to endin a cul de sac beyond which no progress is possible. The forms thuscornered soon become extinct. The mystery, the unaccountable thing, is the appearance of new characters. The slow modification ortransformation of an existing character may often be traced; naturalselection, or the struggle for existence, takes it in hand andadapts and perpetuates it, or else eliminates it. But the origin ofcertain new parts or characters--that is the secret of theevolutionary process. Thus there was a time when no animal hadhorns; then horns appeared. "In the great quadruped known astitanothere, " says Osborn, "rudiments of horns first ariseindependently at certain definite parts of the skull; they arise atfirst alike in both sexes, or asexually; then they become sexual, orchiefly characteristic of males; then they rapidly evolve in themales while being arrested in development in the females; finally, they become in some of the animals dominant characteristics to whichall others bend. " Nature seems to throw out these new characters andthen lets them take their chances in the clash of forces andtendencies that go on in the arena of life. If they serve a purposeor are an advantage, they remain; if not, they drop out. Naturefeels her way. The horns proved of less advantage to the femalesthan to the males; they seem a part of the plus or overflow of themale principle, like the beard in man--the badge of masculinity. Thetitanothere is traceable back to a hornless animal the size of asheep, and it ended in a horned quadruped nearly as large as anelephant. It flourished in Wyoming in early Tertiary times. Naturedid not seem to know what to do with horns when she first got them. She played with them like a child with a new toy. Thus she gave twopairs to several species of mammals, one pair on the nose and onepair on the top of the skull--certainly an embarrassment of weapons. 

The first horns appear to have been crude, heavy, uncouth, but longbefore we reach our own geologic era they appear in various speciesof quadrupeds, and become graceful and ornamental. How beautifulthey are in many of the African antelope tribe! Nature's workmanshipnearly always improves with time, like that of man's, and sooner orlater takes on an ornamental phase. 

The early uncouth, bizarre forms seem to be the result of the excessor surplus of life. Life in remote biologic times was rank andriotous, as it is now, in a measure, in tropical lands. One reasonmay be that the climate of the globe during the middle period, andwell into the third period, appears to have been of a tropicalcharacter. The climatic and seasonal divisions were not at allpronounced, and both animal and vegetable life took on gigantic andgrotesque forms. In the ugliness of alligator and rhinoceros andhippopotamus of our day we get some hint of what early reptilian andmammalian life was like. 

That Nature should have turned out better and better handiwork asthe ages passed; that she either should have improved upon everymodel or else discarded it; that she should have progressed from thebird, half-dragon, to the sweet songsters of our day and to thesuperb forms of the air that we know; that evolution should haveentered upon a refining and spiritualizing phase, developing largerbrains and smaller bodies, is a very significant fact, and one quitebeyond the range of the mechanistic conception of life. 

Our own immediate line of descent leads down through the minor formsof Tertiary and Mesozoic times--forms that probably skulked anddodged about amid the terrible and gigantic creatures of those agesas the small game of to-day hide and flee from the presence of theirarch-enemy, man; and that the frail line upon which the fate of thehuman race hung should not have been severed during the wild turmoilof those ages is, to me, a source of perpetual wonder. 

III

The hazards of the future of the race must be quite different fromthose I have been considering. They are the hazards incident to anexceptional being upon this earth--a being that takes his fate inhis own hands in a sense that no other creature does. 

Man has partaken of the fruit of the Tree of Good and Evil, whichall the lower orders have escaped. He knows, and knows that heknows. Will this knowledge, through the opposition in which itplaces him to elemental nature and the vast system of artificialthings with which it has enabled him to surround himself, cut shorthis history upon this planet? Will Nature in the end be avenged forthe secrets he has forced from her? His civilization has doubtlessmade him the victim of diseases to which the lower orders, and evensavage man, are strangers. Will not these diseases increase as hislife becomes more and more complex and artificial? Will he go onextending his mastery over Nature and refining or suppressing hisnatural appetites till his original hold upon life is fatallyenfeebled?

It seems as though science ought to save man and prolong his stay onthis planet, --it ought to bring him natural salvation, as hisreligion promises him supernatural salvation. But of course, man'sfate is bound up with the fate of the planet and of the biologicaltree of which he is one of the shoots. Biology is rooted in geology. The higher forms of life did not arbitrarily appear, they flowed outof conditions that were long in maturing; they flowered in season, and the flower will fall in season. Man could not have appearedearlier than he did, nor later than he did; he came out of what wentbefore, and he will go out with what comes after. His coming wasnatural, and his going will be natural. His period had a beginning, and it will have an end. Natural philosophy leads one to affirmthis; but of time measured by human history he may yet have a leaseof tens of thousands of years. 

The hazard of the future is a question of both astronomy andgeology. That there are cosmic dangers, though infinitely remote, every astronomer knows. That there are collisions between heavenlybodies is an indubitable fact, and if collisions do happen to any, allow time enough and they must happen to all. That there aregeologic dangers through the shifting and crumpling of the earth'scrust, every geologist knows, though probably none that could wipeout the whole race of man. The biologic dangers of the past we haveoutlived--the dangers that must have beset a single line of descentamid the carnival of power and the ferocity of the monster reptilesof Mesozoic times, and the wholesale extinction of species thatoccurred in different geologic periods. 

Nothing but a cosmic catastrophe, involving the fate of the wholeearth, could now exterminate the human race. It is highly improbablethat this will ever happen. The race of man will go out from a slow, insensible failure, through the aging of the planet, of theconditions of life that brought man here. The evolutionary processupon a cooling world must, after the elapse of a vast period oftime, lose its impetus and cease. 

XIII

THE GOSPEL OF NATURE

I

The other day a clergyman who described himself as a preacher of thegospel of Christ wrote, asking me to come and talk to his people onthe gospel of Nature. The request set me to thinking whether or notNature has any gospel in the sense the clergyman had in mind, anymessage that is likely to be specially comforting to the averageorthodox religious person. I suppose the parson wished me to tellhis flock what I had found in Nature that was a strength or a solaceto myself. 

What had all my many years of journeyings to Nature yielded me thatwould supplement or reinforce the gospel he was preaching? Had thebirds taught me any valuable lessons? Had the four-footed beasts?Had the insects? Had the flowers, the trees, the soil, the comingand the going of the seasons? Had I really found sermons in stones, books in running brooks and good in everything? Had the lilies ofthe field, that neither toil nor spin, and yet are more royally cladthan Solomon in all his glory, helped me in any way to clothe myselfwith humility, with justice, with truthfulness?

It is not easy for one to say just what he owes to all these things. Natural influences work indirectly as well as directly; they workupon the subconscious, as well as upon the conscious, self. That Iam a saner, healthier, more contented man, with truer standards oflife, for all my loiterings in the fields and woods, I am fullyconvinced. 

That I am less social, less interested in my neighbors and in thebody politic, more inclined to shirk civic and socialresponsibilities and to stop my ears against the brawling of thereformers, is perhaps equally true. 

One thing is certain, in a hygienic way I owe much to my excursionsto Nature. They have helped to clothe me with health, if not withhumility; they have helped sharpen and attune all my senses; theyhave kept my eyes in such good trim that they have not failed me forone moment during all the seventy-five years I have had them; theyhave made my sense of smell so keen that I have much pleasure in thewild, open-air perfumes, especially in the spring--the delicatebreath of the blooming elms and maples and willows, the breath ofthe woods, of the pastures, of the shore. This keen, healthy senseof smell has made me abhor tobacco and flee from close rooms, andput the stench of cities behind me. I fancy that this whole world ofwild, natural perfumes is lost to the tobacco-user and to the city-dweller. Senses trained in the open air are in tune with open-airobjects; they are quick, delicate, and discriminating. When I go totown, my ear suffers as well as my nose: the impact of the city uponmy senses is hard and dissonant; the ear is stunned, the nose isoutraged, and the eye is confused. When I come back, I go to Natureto be soothed and healed, and to have my senses put in tune oncemore. I know that, as a rule, country or farming folk are notremarkable for the delicacy of their senses, but this is owingmainly to the benumbing and brutalizing effect of continued hardlabor. It is their minds more than their bodies that suffer. 

When I have dwelt in cities the country was always near by, and Iused to get a bite of country soil at least once a week to keep mysystem normal. 

Emerson says that "the day does not seem wholly profane in which wehave given heed to some natural object. " If Emerson had stopped toqualify his remark, he would have added, if we give heed to it inthe right spirit, if we give heed to it as a nature-lover andtruth-seeker. Nature love as Emerson knew it, and as Wordsworth knewit, and as any of the choicer spirits of our time have known it, hasdistinctly a religious value. It does not come to a man or a womanwho is wholly absorbed in selfish or worldly or material ends. Except ye become in a measure as little children, ye cannot enterthe kingdom of Nature--as Audubon entered it, as Thoreau entered it, as Bryant and Amiel entered it, and as all those enter it who makeit a resource in their lives and an instrument of their culture. Theforms and creeds of religion change, but the sentiment ofreligion--the wonder and reverence and love we feel in the presenceof the inscrutable universe--persists. Indeed, these seem to berenewing their life to-day in this growing love for all naturalobjects and in this increasing tenderness toward all forms of life. If we do not go to church so much as did our fathers, we go to thewoods much more, and are much more inclined to make a temple of themthan they were. 

We now use the word Nature very much as our fathers used the wordGod, and, I suppose, back of it all we mean the power that iseverywhere present and active, and in whose lap the visible universeis held and nourished. It is a power that we can see and touch andhear, and realize every moment of our lives how absolutely we aredependent upon it. There are no atheists or skeptics in regard tothis power. All men see how literally we are its children, and allmen learn how swift and sure is the penalty of disobedience to itscommands. 

Our associations with Nature vulgarize it and rob it of itsdivinity. When we come to see that the celestial and the terrestrialare one, that time and eternity are one, that mind and matter areone, that death and life are one, that there is and can be nothingnot inherent in Nature, then we no longer look for or expect afar-off, unknown God. 

Nature teaches more than she preaches. There are no sermons instones. It is easier to get a spark out of a stone than a moral. Even when it contains a fossil, it teaches history rather thanmorals. It comes down from the fore-world an undigested bit that hasresisted the tooth and maw of time, and can tell you many things ifyou have the eye to read them. The soil upon which it lies or inwhich it is imbedded was rock, too, back in geologic time, but themill that ground it up passed the fragment of stone through withoutentirely reducing it. Very likely it is made up of the minuteremains of innumerable tiny creatures that lived and died in theancient seas. Very likely it was torn from its parent rock andbrought to the place where it now lies by the great ice-flood thatmany tens of thousands of years ago crept slowly but irresistiblydown out of the North over the greater part of all the northerncontinents. 

But all this appeals to the intellect, and contains no lesson forthe moral nature. If we are to find sermons in stones, we are tolook for them in the relations of the stones to other things--whenthey are out of place, when they press down the grass or theflowers, or impede the plow, or dull the scythe, or usurp the soil, or shelter vermin, as do old institutions and old usages that havehad their day. A stone that is much knocked about gets its sharpangles worn off, as do men. "A rolling stone gathers no moss, " whichis not bad for the stone, as moss hastens decay. "Killing two birdswith one stone" is a bad saying, because it reminds boys to stonethe birds, which is bad for both boys and birds. But "People wholive in glass houses should not throw stones" is on the right sideof the account, as it discourages stone-throwing and reminds us thatwe are no better than our neighbors. 

The lesson in running brooks is that motion is a great purifier andhealth-producer. When the brook ceases to run, it soon stagnates. Itkeeps in touch with the great vital currents when it is in motion, and unites with other brooks to help make the river. In motion itsoon leaves all mud and sediment behind. Do not proper work and theexercise of will power have the same effect upon our lives?

The other day in my walk I came upon a sap-bucket that had beenleft standing by the maple tree all the spring and summer. What abucketful of corruption was that, a mixture of sap and rainwaterthat had rotted, and smelled to heaven. Mice and birds and insectshad been drowned in it, and added to its unsavory character. It wasa bit of Nature cut off from the vitalizing and purifying chem-istry of the whole. With what satisfaction I emptied it upon theground while I held my nose and saw it filter into the turf, where Iknew it was dying to go and where I knew every particle of thereeking, fetid fluid would soon be made sweet and wholesome again bythe chemistry of the soil!

II

I am not always in sympathy with nature-study as pursued in theschools, as if this kingdom could be carried by assault. Such studyis too cold, too special, too mechanical; it is likely to rub thebloom off Nature. It lacks soul and emotion; it misses theaccessories of the open air and its exhilarations, the sky, theclouds, the landscape, and the currents of life that pulseeverywhere. 

I myself have never made a dead set at studying Nature withnote-book and field-glass in hand. I have rather visited with her. We have walked together or sat down together, and our intimacy growswith the seasons. What I have learned about her ways I have learnedeasily, almost unconsciously, while fishing or camping or idlingabout. My desultory habits have their disadvantages, no doubt, butthey have their advantages also. A too strenuous pursuit defeatsitself. In the fields and woods more than anywhere else all thingscome to those who wait, because all things are on the move, and aresure sooner or later to come your way. 

To absorb a thing is better than to learn it, and we absorb what weenjoy. We learn things at school, we absorb them in the fields andwoods and on the farm. When we look upon Nature with fondness andappreciation she meets us halfway and takes a deeper hold upon usthan when studiously conned. Hence I say the way of knowledge ofNature is the way of love and enjoyment, and is more surely found inthe open air than in the school-room or the laboratory. The otherday I saw a lot of college girls dissecting cats and making diagramsof the circulation and muscle-attachments, and I thought it prettypoor business unless the girls were taking a course in comparativeanatomy with a view to some occupation in life. What is the moraland intellectual value of this kind of knowledge to those girls?Biology is, no doubt, a great science in the hands of great men, butit is not for all. I myself have got along very well without it. Iam sure I can learn more of what I want to know from a kitten on myknee than from the carcass of a cat in the laboratory. Darwin spenteight years dissecting barnacles; but he was Darwin, and did notstop at barnacles, as these college girls are pretty sure to stop atcats. He dissected and put together again in his mental laboratorythe whole system of animal life, and the upshot of his work was atremendous gain to our understanding of the universe. 

I would rather see the girls in the fields and woods studying andenjoying living nature, training their eyes to see correctly andtheir hearts to respond intelligently. What is knowledge withoutenjoyment, without love? It is sympathy, appreciation, emotionalexperience, which refine and elevate and breathe into exactknowledge the breath of life. My own interest is in living nature asit moves and flourishes about me winter and summer. 

I know it is one thing to go forth as a nature-lover, and quiteanother to go forth in a spirit of cold, calculating, exact science. I call myself a nature-lover and not a scientific naturalist. Allthat science has to tell me is welcome, is, indeed, eagerly soughtfor. I must know as well as feel. I am not merely contented, likeWordsworth's poet, to enjoy what others understand. I mustunderstand also; but above all things I must enjoy. How much of myenjoyment springs from my knowledge I do not know. The joy ofknowing is very great; the delight of picking up the threads ofmeaning here and there, and following them through the maze ofconfusing facts, I know well. When I hear the woodpecker drumming ona dry limb in spring or the grouse drumming in the woods, and knowwhat it is all for, why, that knowledge, I suppose, is part of myenjoyment. The other part is the associations that those sounds callup as voicing the arrival of spring: they are the drums that leadthe joyous procession. 

To enjoy understandingly, that, I fancy, is the great thing to bedesired. When I see the large ichneumon-fly, Thalessa, making a loopover her back with her long ovipositor and drilling a hole in thetrunk of a tree, I do not fully appreciate the spectacle till I knowshe is feeling for the burrow of a tree-borer, Tremex, upon thelarvae of which her own young feed. She must survey her territorylike an oil-digger and calculate where she is likely to strike oil, which in her case is the burrow of her host Tremex. There is a vastseries of facts in natural history like this that are of littleinterest until we understand them. They are like the outside of abook which may attract us, but which can mean little to us until wehave opened and perused its pages. 

The nature-lover is not looking for mere facts, but for meanings, for something he can translate into the terms of his own life. Hewants facts, but significant facts--luminous facts that throw lightupon the ways of animate and inanimate nature. A bird picking upcrumbs from my window-sill does not mean much to me. It is apleasing sight and touches a tender cord, but it does not add muchto my knowledge of bird-life. But when I see a bird pecking andfluttering angrily at my window-pane, as I now and then do inspring, apparently under violent pressure to get in, I am witnessinga significant comedy in bird-life, one that illustrates the limitsof animal instinct. The bird takes its own reflected image in theglass for a hated rival, and is bent on demolishing it. Let theassaulting bird get a glimpse of the inside of the empty roomthrough a broken pane, and it is none the wiser; it returns to theassault as vigorously as ever. 

The fossils in the rocks did not mean much to the earliergeologists. They looked upon them as freaks of Nature, whims of thecreative energy, or vestiges of Noah's flood. You see they wereblinded by the preconceived notions of the six-day theory ofcreation. 

III

I do not know that the bird has taught me any valuable lesson. Indeed, I do not go to Nature to be taught. I go for enjoyment andcompanionship. I go to bathe in her as in a sea; I go to give myeyes and ears and all my senses a free, clean field and to tone upmy spirits by her "primal sanities. " If the bird has not preached tome, it has added to the resources of my life, it has widened thefield of my interests, it has afforded me another beautiful objectto love, and has helped make me feel more at home in this world. Totake the birds out of my life would be like lopping off so manybranches from the tree: there is so much less surface of leafage toabsorb the sunlight and bring my spirits in contact with the vitalcurrents. We cannot pursue any natural study with love andenthusiasm without the object of it becoming a part of our lives. The birds, the flowers, the trees, the rocks, all become linked withour lives and hold the key to our thoughts and emotions. 

Not till the bird becomes a part of your life can its coming and itsgoing mean much to you. And it becomes a part of your life when youhave taken heed of it with interest and affection, when you haveestablished associations with it, when it voices the spring or thesummer to you, when it calls up the spirit of the woods or thefields or the shore. When year after year you have heard the veeryin the beech and birch woods along the trout streams, or the woodthrush May after May in the groves where you have walked or sat, andthe bobolink summer after summer in the home meadows, or the vespersparrow in the upland pastures where you have loitered as a boy ormused as a man, these birds will really be woven into the texture ofyour life. 

What lessons the birds have taught me I cannot recall; what a joythey have been to me I know well. In a new place, amid strangescenes, theirs are the voices and the faces of old friends. InBermuda the bluebirds and the catbirds and the cardinals seemed tomake American territory of it. Our birds had annexed the islanddespite the Britishers. 

For many years I have in late April seen the red-poll warbler, perhaps for only a single day, flitting about as I walked or worked. It is usually my first warbler, and my associations with it are verypleasing. But I really did not know how pleasing until, one Marchday, when I was convalescing from a serious illness in one of oursea-coast towns, I chanced to spy the little traveler in a vacantlot along the street, now upon the ground, now upon a bush, nervousand hurried as usual, uttering its sharp chip, and showing the whitein its tail. The sight gave me a real home feeling. It did me moregood than the medicine I was taking. It instantly made a living linkwith many past springs. Anything that calls up a happy past, how itwarms the present! There, too, that same day I saw my firstmeadowlark of the season in a vacant lot, flashing out the whitequills in her tail, and walking over the turf in the old, erect, alert manner. The sight was as good as a letter from home, andbetter: it had a flavor of the wild and of my boyhood days on theold farm that no letter could ever have. 

The spring birds always awaken a thrill wherever I am. The firstbobolink I hear flying over northward and bursting out in song nowand then, full of anticipation of those broad meadows where he willsoon be with his mate; or the first swallow twittering joyouslyoverhead, borne on a warm southern breeze; or the first high-holesounding out his long, iterated call from the orchard or field--howall these things send a wave of emotion over me!

Pleasures of another kind are to find a new bird, and to see an oldbird in a new place, as I did recently in the old sugar-bush where Iused to help gather and boil sap as a boy. It was the logcock, orpileated woodpecker, a rare bird anywhere, and one I had never seenbefore on the old farm. I heard his loud cackle in a maple tree, sawhim flit from branch to branch for a few moments, and then launchout and fly toward a distant wood. But he left an impression with methat I should be sorry to have missed. 

Nature stimulates our aesthetic and our intellectual life and to acertain extent our religious emotions, but I fear we cannot findmuch support for our ethical system in the ways of wild Nature. Iknow our artist naturalist, Ernest Thompson Seton, claims to findwhat we may call the biological value of the Ten Commandments in thelives of the wild animals; but I cannot make his reasoning holdwater, at least not much of it. Of course the Ten Commandments arenot arbitrary laws. They are largely founded upon the needs of thesocial organism; but whether they have the same foundation in theneeds of animal life apart from man, apart from the world of moralobligation, is another question. The animals are neither moral norimmoral: they are unmoral; their needs are all physical. It is truethat the command against murder is pretty well kept by the higheranimals. They rarely kill their own kind: hawks do not prey uponhawks, nor foxes prey upon foxes, nor weasels upon weasels; butlower down this does not hold. Trout eat trout, and pickerel eatpickerel, and among the insects young spiders eat one another, andthe female spider eats her mate, if she can get him. There is butlittle, if any, neighborly love among even the higher animals. Theytreat one another as rivals, or associate for mutual protection. Onecow will lick and comb another in the most affectionate manner, andthe next moment savagely gore her. Hate and cruelty for the mostpart rule in the animal world. A few of the higher animals aremonogamous, but by far the greater number of species are polygamousor promiscuous. There is no mating or pairing in the great bovinetribe, and none among the rodents that I know of, or among the bearfamily, or the cat family, or among the seals. When we come to thebirds, we find mating, and occasional pairing for life, as with theostrich and perhaps the eagle. 

As for the rights of property among the animals, I do not see how wecan know just how far those rights are respected among individualsof the same species. We know that bees will rob bees, and that antswill rob ants; but whether or not one chipmunk or one flyingsquirrel or one wood mouse will plunder the stores of another I donot know. Probably not, as the owner of such stores is usually onhand to protect them. Moreover, these provident little creatures alllay up stores in the autumn, before the season of scarcity sets in, and so have no need to plunder one another. In case the stores ofone squirrel were destroyed by some means, and it were able todispossess another of its hoard, would it not in that case be asurvival of the fittest, and so conducive to the well-being of therace of squirrels?

I have never known any of our wild birds to steal thenesting-material of another bird of the same kind, but I have knownbirds to try to carry off the material belonging to other species. 

But usually the rule of might is the rule of right among theanimals. As to most of the other commandments, --of coveting, ofbearing false witness, of honoring the father and the mother, and soforth, --how can these apply to the animals or have any biologicalvalue to them? Parental obedience among them is not a very definitething. There is neither obedience nor disobedience, because thereare no commands. The alarm-cries of the parents are quicklyunderstood by the young, and their actions imitated in the presenceof danger, all of which of course has a biological value. 

The instances which Mr. Seton cites of animals fleeing to man forprotection from their enemies prove to my mind only how the greaterfear drives out the lesser. The hotly pursued animal sees a possiblecover in a group of men and horses or in an unoccupied house, andrushes there to hide. What else could the act mean? So a hunted deeror sheep will leap from a precipice which, under ordinarycircumstances, it would avoid. So would a man. Fear makes bold insuch cases. 

I certainly have found "good in everything, "--in all naturalprocesses and products, --not the "good" of the Sunday-school books, but the good of natural law and order, the good of that system ofthings out of which we came and which is the source of our healthand strength. It is good that fire should burn, even if it consumesyour house; it is good that force should crush, even if it crushesyou; it is good that rain should fall, even if it destroys yourcrops or floods your land. Plagues and pestilences attest theconstancy of natural law. They set us to cleaning our streets andhouses and to readjusting our relations to outward nature. Only in alive universe could disease and death prevail. Death is a phase oflife, a redistributing of the type. Decay is another kind of growth. 

Yes, good in everything, because law in everything, truth ineverything, the sequence of cause and effect in everything, and itmay all be good to me if on the right principles I relate my life toit. I can make the heat and the cold serve me, the winds and thefloods, gravity and all the chemical and dynamical forces, serve me, if I take hold of them by the right handle. The bad in things arisesfrom our abuse or misuse of them or from our wrong relations tothem. A thing is good or bad according as it stands related to myconstitution. We say the order of nature is rational; but is it notbecause our reason is the outcome of that order? Our well-beingconsists in learning it and in adjusting our lives to it. When wecross it or seek to contravene it, we are destroyed. But Nature inher universal procedures is not rational, as I am rational when Iweed my garden, prune my trees, select my seed or my stock, or armmyself with tools or weapons. In such matters I take a short cut tothat which Nature reaches by a slow, roundabout, and wastefulprocess. How does she weed her garden? By the survival of thefittest. How does she select her breeding-stock? By the law ofbattle; the strongest rules. Hers, I repeat, is a slow and wastefulprocess. She fertilizes the soil by plowing in the crop. She cannottake a short cut. She assorts and arranges her goods by the law ofthe winds and the tides. She builds up with one hand and pulls downwith the other. Man changes the conditions to suit the things. Nature changes the things to suit the conditions. She adapts theplant or the animal to its environment. She does not drain hermarshes; she fills them up. Hers is the larger reason--the reason ofthe All. Man's reason introduces a new method; it cuts across, modifies, or abridges the order of Nature. I do not see design inNature in the old ideological sense; but I see everything working toits own proper end, and that end is foretold in the means. Thingsare not designed; things are begotten. It is as if the final plan ofa man's house, after he had begun to build it, should be determinedby the winds and the rains and the shape of the ground upon which itstands. The eye is begotten by those vibrations in the ether calledlight, the ear by those vibrations in the air called sound, thesense of smell by those emanations called odors. There are probablyother vibrations and emanations that we have no senses for becauseour well-being does not demand them. 

We think it reasonable that a stone should fall and that smokeshould rise because we have never known either of them to do thecontrary. We think it reasonable that fire should burn and thatfrost should freeze, because this accords with universal experience. Thus, there is a large order of facts that are reasonable becausethey are invariable: the same effect always follows the same cause. Our reason is developed and disciplined by observing the order ofNature; and yet human rationality is of another order from therationality of Nature. Man learns from Nature how to master andcontrol her. He turns her currents into new channels; he spurs herin directions of his own. Nature has no economic or scientificrationality. She progresses by the method of trial and error. Heradvance is symbolized by that of the child learning to walk. Sheexperiments endlessly. Evolution has worked all around the horizon. In feeling her way to man she has produced thousands of other formsof life. The globe is peopled as it is because the creative energywas blind and did not at once find the single straight road to man. Had the law of variation worked only in one direction, man mighthave found himself the sole occupant of the universe. Behold thevarieties of trees, of shrubs, of grasses, of birds, of insects, because Nature does not work as man does, with an eye single to oneparticular end. She scatters, she sows her seed upon the wind, shecommits her germs to the waves and the floods. Nature is indifferentto waste, because what goes out of one pocket goes into another. Sheis indifferent to failure, because failure on one line means successon some other. 

IV

But I am not preaching much of a gospel, am I? Only the gospel ofcontentment, of appreciation, of heeding simple near-by things--agospel the burden of which still is love, but love that goes hand inhand with understanding. 

There is so much in Nature that is lovely and lovable, and so muchthat gives us pause. But here it is, and here we are, and we mustmake the most of it. If the ways of the Eternal as revealed in hisworks are past finding out, we must still unflinchingly face whatour reason reveals to us. "Red in tooth and claw. " Nature does notpreach; she enforces, she executes. All her answers are yea, yea, ornay, nay. Of the virtues and beatitudes of which the gospel ofChrist makes so much--meekness, forgiveness, self-denial, charity, love, holiness--she knows nothing. Put yourself in her way, and shecrushes you; she burns you, freezes you, stings you, bites you, ordevours you. 

Yet I would not say that the study of Nature did not favor meeknessor sobriety or gentleness or forgiveness or charity, because thegreat Nature students and prophets, like Darwin, would rise up andconfound me. Certainly it favors seriousness, truthfulness, andsimplicity of life; or, are only the serious and single-minded drawnto the study of Nature? I doubt very much if it favors devoutness orholiness, as those qualities are inculcated by the church, or anyform of religious enthusiasm. Devoutness and holiness come of anattitude toward the universe that is in many ways incompatible withthat implied by the pursuit of natural science. The joy of theNature student like Darwin or any great naturalist is to know, tofind out the reason of things and the meaning of things, to tracethe footsteps of the creative energy; while the religious devotee isintent only upon losing himself in infinite being. True, there havebeen devout naturalists and men of science; but their devoutness didnot date from their Nature studies, but from their training, or fromthe times in which they lived. Theology and science, it must besaid, will not mingle much better than oil and water, and yourdevout scientist and devout Nature student lives in two separatecompartments of his being at different times. Intercourse withNature--I mean intellectual intercourse, not merely the emotionalintercourse of the sailor or explorer or farmer--tends to beget ahabit of mind the farthest possible removed from the myth-making, the vision-seeing, the voice-hearing habit and temper. In allmatters relating to the visible, concrete universe it substitutesbroad daylight for twilight; it supplants fear with curiosity; itoverthrows superstition with fact; it blights credulity with thefrost of skepticism. I say frost of skepticism advisedly. Skepticismis a much more healthful and robust habit of mind than the limp, pale-blooded, non-resisting habit that we call credulity. 

In intercourse with Nature you are dealing with things at firsthand, and you get a rule, a standard, that serves you through life. You are dealing with primal sanities, primal honesties, primalattraction; you are touching at least the hem of the garment withwhich the infinite is clothed, and virtue goes out from it to you. It must be added that you are dealing with primal cruelty, primalblindness, primal wastefulness, also. Nature works with reference tono measure of time, no bounds of space, and no limits of material. Her economies are not our economies. She is prodigal, she iscareless, she is indifferent; yet nothing is lost. What she lavisheswith one hand, she gathers in with the other. She is blind, yet shehits the mark because she shoots in all directions. Her germs fillthe air; the winds and the tides are her couriers. When you thinkyou have defeated her, your triumph is hers; it is still by her lawsthat you reach your end. 

We make ready our garden in a season, and plant our seeds and hoeour crops by some sort of system. Can any one tell how many hundredsof millions of years Nature has been making ready her garden andplanting her seeds?

There can be little doubt, I think, but that intercourse with Natureand a knowledge of her ways tends to simplicity of life. We comemore and more to see through the follies and vanities of the worldand to appreciate the real values. We load ourselves up with so manyfalse burdens, our complex civilization breeds in us so many falseor artificial wants, that we become separated from the real sourcesof our strength and health as by a gulf. 

For my part, as I grow older I am more and more inclined to reducemy baggage, to lop off superfluities. I become more and more in lovewith simple things and simple folk--a small house, a hut in thewoods, a tent on the shore. The show and splendor of great houses, elaborate furnishings, stately halls, oppress me, impose upon me. They fix the attention upon false values, they set up a falsestandard of beauty; they stand between me and the real feeders ofcharacter and thought. A man needs a good roof over his head winterand summer, and a good chimney and a big wood-pile in winter. Themore open his four walls are, the more fresh air he will get, andthe longer he will live. 

How the contemplation of Nature as a whole does take the conceit outof us! How we dwindle to mere specks and our little lives to thespan of a moment in the presence of the cosmic bodies and theinterstellar spaces! How we hurry! How we husband our time! A year, a month, a day, an hour may mean so much to us. Behold the infiniteleisure of Nature!

A few trillions or quadrillions of years, what matters it to theEternal? Jupiter and Saturn must be billions of years older than theearth. They are evidently yet passing through that condition ofcloud and vapor and heat that the earth passed through untold aeonsago, and they will not reach the stage of life till aeons to come. But what matters it? Only man hurries. Only the Eternal has infinitetime. When life comes to Jupiter, the earth will doubtless long havebeen a dead world. It may continue a dead world for aeons longerbefore it is melted up in the eternal crucible and recast, and seton its career of life again. 

Familiarity with the ways of the Eternal as they are revealed in thephysical universe certainly tends to keep a man sane and sober andsafeguards him against the vagaries and half-truths which our creedsand indoor artificial lives tend to breed. Shut away from Nature, oronly studying her through religious fears and superstitions, what amess a large body of mankind in all ages have made of it! Think ofthe obsession of the speedy "end of the world" which has so oftentaken possession of whole communities, as if a world that has beenan eternity in forming could end in a day, or on the striking of theclock! It is not many years since a college professor published abook figuring out, from some old historical documents andpredictions, just the year in which the great mundane show wouldbreak up. When I was a small boy at school in the early forties, during the Millerite excitement about the approaching end of allmundane things, I remember, on the day when the momentous event wasexpected to take place, how the larger school-girls were thrown intoa great state of alarm and agitation by a thundercloud that let downa curtain of rain, blotting out the mountain on the opposite side ofthe valley. "There it comes!" they said, and their tears flowedcopiously. I remember that I did not share their fears, but watchedthe cloud, curious as to what the end of the world would be like. Icannot brag, as Thoreau did, when he said he would not go around thecorner to see the world blow up. I am quite sure my curiosity wouldget the better of me and that I should go, even at this late day. Orthink of the more harmless obsession of many good people about thesecond coming of Christ, or about the resurrection of the physicalbody when the last trumpet shall sound. A little natural knowledgeought to be fatal to all such notions. Natural knowledge shows ushow transient and insignificant we are, and how vast and everlastingthe world is, which was aeons before we were, and will be otheraeons after we are gone, yea, after the whole race of man is gone. Natural knowledge takes the conceit out of us, and is the sureantidote to all our petty anthropomorphic views of the universe. 

V

I was struck by this passage in one of the recently publishedletters of Saint-Gaudens: "The principal thought in my life is thatwe are on a planet going no one knows where, probably to somethinghigher (on the Darwinian principle of evolution); that, whatever itis, the passage is terribly sad and tragic, and to bear up at timesagainst what seems to be the Great Power that is over us, thepractice of love, charity, and courage are the great things. "

The "Great Power" that is over us does seem unmindful of us asindividuals, if it does not seem positively against us, asSaint-Gaudens seemed to think it was. 

Surely the ways of the Eternal are not as our ways. Our standards ofprudence, of economy, of usefulness, of waste, of delay, offailure--how far off they seem from the scale upon which theuniverse is managed or deports itself! If the earth should be blownto pieces to-day, and all life instantly blotted out, would it notbe just like what we know of the cosmic prodigality andindifference? Such appalling disregard of all human motives and endsbewilders us. 

Of all the planets of our system probably only two or three are in acondition to sustain life. Mercury, the youngest of them all, isdoubtless a dead world, with absolute zero on one side and a furnacetemperature on the other. But what matters it? Whose loss or gain isit? Life seems only an incident in the universe, evidently not anend. It appears or it does not appear, and who shall say yea or nay?The asteroids at one time no doubt formed a planet between Mars andJupiter. Some force which no adjective can describe or qualify blewit into fragments, and there, in its stead, is this swarm of hugerocks making their useless rounds in the light of the sun foreverand ever. What matters it to the prodigal All? Bodies larger thanour sun collide in the depths of space before our eyes with resultsso terrific that words cannot even hint them. The last of thesecollisions--of this "wreck of matter and crush of worlds"--reporteditself to our planet in February, 1901, when a star of the twelfthmagnitude suddenly blazed out as a star of the first magnitude andthen slowly faded. It was the grand finale of the independentexistence of two enormous celestial bodies. They apparently ended indust that whirled away in the vast abyss of siderial space, blown bythe winds upon which suns and systems drift as autumn leaves. Itwould be quite in keeping with the observed ways of the Eternal, ifthese bodies had had worlds in their train, teeming with life, whichmet the same fate as the central colliding bodies. 

Does not force as we know it in this world go its own way with thesame disregard of the precious thing we call life? Such long andpatient preparations for it, --apparently the whole stellar system inlabor pains to bring it forth, --and yet held so cheaply andindifferently in the end! The small insect that just now alighted infront of my jack-plane as I was dressing a timber, and was reducedto a faint yellow stain upon the wood, is typical of the fate of manbefore the unregarding and unswerving terrestrial and celestialforces. The great wheels go round just the same whether they arecrushing the man or crushing the corn for his bread. It is all oneto the Eternal. Flood, fire, wind, gravity, are for us or against usindifferently. And yet the earth is here, garlanded with the seasonsand riding in the celestial currents like a ship in calm summerseas, and man is here with all things under his feet. All is well inour corner of the universe. The great mill has made meal of ourgrist and not of the miller. We have taken our chances and have won. More has been for us than against us. During the little segment oftime that man has been upon the earth, only one great calamity thatmight be called cosmical has befallen it. The ice age of one or twohundred thousand years was such a calamity. But man survived it. Thespring came again, and life, the traveler, picked itself up and madea new start. But if he had not survived it, if nothing had survivedit, the great procession would have gone on just the same; the godswould have been just as well pleased. 

The battle is to the strong, the race is to the fleet. This is theorder of nature. No matter for the rest, for the weak, the slow, theunlucky, so that the fight is won, so that the race of mancontinues. You and I may fail and fall before our time; the end maybe a tragedy or a comedy. What matters it? Only some one mustsucceed, will succeed. 

We are here, I say, because, in the conflict of forces, theinfluences that made for life have been in the ascendant. Thisconflict of forces has been a part of the process of ourdevelopment. We have been ground out as between an upper and anether millstone, but we have squeezed through, we have actuallyarrived, and are all the better for the grinding--all those who havesurvived. But, alas for those whose lives went out in the crush!Maybe they often broke the force of the blow for us. 

Nature is not benevolent; Nature is just, gives pound for pound, measure for measure, makes no exceptions, never tempers her decreeswith mercy, or winks at any infringement of her laws. And in the endis not this best? Could the universe be run as a charity or abenevolent institution, or as a poor-house of the most approvedpattern? Without this merciless justice, this irrefragable law, where should we have brought up long ago? It is a hard gospel; butrocks are hard too, yet they form the foundations of the hills. 

Man introduces benevolence, mercy, altruism, into the world, and hepays the price in his added burdens; and he reaps his reward in thevast social and civic organizations that were impossible withoutthese things. 

I have no doubt that the life of man upon this planet will end, asall other forms of life will end. But the potential man willcontinue and does continue on other spheres. One cannot think of onepart of the universe as producing man, and no other part as capableof it. The universe is all of a piece so far as its materialconstituents are concerned; that we know. Can there be any doubtthat it is all of a piece so far as its invisible and intangibleforces and capabilities are concerned? Can we believe that the earthis an alien and a stranger in the universe? that it has no near kin?that there is no tie of blood, so to speak, between it and the otherplanets and systems? Are the planets not all of one family, sittingaround the same central source of warmth and life? And is not oursystem a member of a still larger family or tribe, and it of a stilllarger, all bound together by ties of consanguinity? Size isnothing, space is nothing. The worlds are only red corpuscles in thearteries of the infinite. If man has not yet appeared on the otherplanets, he will in time appear, and when he has disappeared fromthis globe, he will still continue elsewhere. 

I do not say that he is the end and aim of creation; it would belogical, I think, to expect a still higher form. Man has been manbut a little while comparatively, less than one hour of the twenty-four of the vast geologic day; a few hours more and he will be gone;less than another geologic day like the past, and no doubt all lifefrom the earth will be gone. What then? The game will be played overand over again in other worlds, without approaching any nearer thefinal end than we are now. There is no final end, as there was noabsolute beginning, and can be none with the infinite. 

THE END