THROUGH THE GEOLOGIST S EYES 



upon his native hills and see them as they were in 

 calculable ages ago, and as they probably will be 

 incalculable ages ahead; those hills, so unchanging 

 during his lifetime, and during a thousand lifetimes, 

 he may see as flitting as the cloud shadows upon the 

 landscape. Out of the dark abyss of geologic time 

 there come stalking the ghosts of lost mountains and 

 lost hills and valleys and plains, or lost rivers and 

 lakes, yea, of lost continents; we see a procession of 

 the phantoms of strange and monstrous beasts, 

 many of them colossal in size and fearful in form, 

 and among the minor forms of this fearful troop of 

 spectres we see the ones that carried safely forward, 

 through the vicissitudes of those ages, the precious 

 impulse that was to eventuate in the human race. 

 Only the geologist knows the part played by ero 

 sion in shaping the earth s surface as we see it. He 

 sees, I repeat, the phantoms of vanished hills and 

 mountains all about us. He sees their shadow forms 

 wherever he looks. He follows out the lines of the 

 flexed or folded strata where they come to the sur 

 face, and thus sketches in the air the elevation that 

 has disappeared. In some places he finds that the 

 valleys have become hills and the hills have become 

 valleys, or that the anticlines and synclines, as he 

 calls them, have changed places as a result of the 

 unequal hardness of the rocks. Over all the older 

 parts of the country the original features have been 

 so changed by erosion that, could they be suddenly 

 91 



