GEOGRAPHICAL EVOLUTION 367 



been taught, by his own bitter experience, that while his aim 

 still is to subdue the earth, he can attain it, not by setting 

 nature and her laws at defiance, but by enlisting them in 

 his service. He has learnt at last to be the minister and 

 interpreter of nature, and he finds in her a ready and un- 

 repining slave. 



In fine, looking back across the long cycles of change 

 through which the land has been shaped into its present 

 form, let us realise that these geographical revolutions are 

 not events wholly of the dim past, but that they are still 

 in progress. So slow and measured has been their march, 

 that even from the earliest times of human history they 

 seem hardly to have advanced at all. But none the less 

 are they surely and steadily transpiring around us. In the 

 fall of rain and the flow of rivers, in the bubble of springs 

 and the silence of frost, in the quiet creep of glaciers and 

 the tumultuous rush of ocean waves, in the tremor of the 

 earthquake and the outburst of the volcano, we may recog- 

 nise the same play of terrestrial forces by which the frame- 

 work of the continents has been step by step evolved. In 

 this light the familiar phenomena of our daily experience 

 acquire an historical interest and dignity. Through them 

 we are enabled to bring the remote past vividly before us, 

 and to look forward hopefully to that great future in which, 

 in the physical not less than in the moral world, man is to 

 be a fellow-worker with God. 



