The Mighty Deep 



specimen, without any obtrusive points or dis- 

 agreeable angles remaining. 



An unpleasant discipline, perhaps ; yet, in the 

 case of sand-grains and also of human beings, 

 worth undergoing for the sake of results. 



Looked upon from a geological point of view, 

 this shape of the sand-grains means merely the 

 wearing and wasting away of substance, with 

 no pretty explanation attached, though with a 

 very definite underlying story of their past 

 history. 



" No workman ever manufactured a half- worn 

 article, and the stones were all worn." So wrote 

 Hugh Miller when describing his first boyish 

 experience of toil in a Scotch quarry twenty 

 years earlier. Boy as he then was, his keen 

 eyes noted the stones, "rounded and water- worn, 

 as if they had been tossed in the sea or in the 

 bed of a river for hundreds of years." Boy 

 as he was, he knew that stones, broken off 

 from larger stones or rocks, have at first their 

 irregular shapes, their corners and jagged points, 

 which can only be worked into smoothness by 

 the action of water. Boy as he was, he realised 

 that these quarry inland stones had once been 

 rubbed and shaped by ocean-waves. 



He made a mistake in his assertion. Some 

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