/4 TALKS ABOUT THE SOIL. 



The moment we come to study the rocks, we find 

 many things that lead us to think that this last opinion 

 must be the truth. The geologist is the student of 

 rocks ; and his history of the world, as he reads it 

 in the rocks themselves, is the geological history of 

 the world. This history, he tells us, is still going on 

 now. The rocks make their own history every day. 

 Day by day, year by year, the face of the rocks 

 changes. From these changes, the geologist has rea- 

 soned backward to the time when the rocks began. 

 He has put many observations together, and formed 

 what seems to be a truthful story. We must glance at 

 this story before we can rightly understand why and 

 how the soil under our feet was made. 



In the beginning God created the universe, "and 

 the earth was without form, and void." There is noth- 

 ing we can know beyond this. We see, far beyond the 

 little group of planets we call the solar system, vapor- 

 ous clouds of light without definite form, vast, void of 

 life, perhaps only clouds of flaming gas. Are these 

 the beginnings of a world ? No man can say ; yet 

 they seem, to suggest the beginnings of a star, and a 

 star is a world. In like manner, our star, now clad 

 with a cold skin of stone, may have been a cloud of 

 fiery gases that through countless ages condensed into 

 a vast ball, swinging round the sun. In time it became 

 more solid, and spent a part of its heat ; for the laws 

 of nature, the laws of light, of sound, electricity, mag- 

 netism, attraction, and chemical action and re-action, 

 were at work then as now. These laws would tend to 



