THE HISTORY OF THE GROUND. 15 



produce, in time, a globe nearly round, with a thin 

 crust on the outside, that, as the cooling and con- 

 densation went on, would shrink and shrivel up into 

 wrinkles and ridges. No man can say how slowly or 

 how rapidly these changes took place. God is in no 

 haste. A million years are as the swing of a pendulum 

 in the clock of his time. All the years, up to the time 

 when the first rocks appeared, are as the dust in the 

 air, past counting. Men have tried to roughly esti- 

 mate them, but it is like measuring a mountain with a 

 yard-stick. We have to be content to call it ages, 

 and without knowing exactly what ages mean. 



It is enough now to imagine that there came a time 

 in the history of our planet when the surface of the 

 earth became hard enough and cool enough to hold 

 water. The clouds, driven off perhaps by the heat, 

 condensed ; and scalding rain fell on the first rocks. 

 What these rocks were, or how they looked, we can 

 only vaguely guess. They may have been precisely 

 like our granites or like the lavas we see to-day thrown 

 out of volcanoes. This does not matter at present. 

 We have only to note that at the time the first rocks 

 appeared, there were winds and storms, lightning, 

 clouds, rains, and eventually hail, snow, and ice. The 

 surface was probably very irregular; and the water 

 gathered in certain places, and the dry land appeared. 

 We have observed in our studies of the weather certain 

 laws governing the temperature, the clouds and rain. 

 There is no reason to think these laws did not prevail 

 then. There is every reason to think that the laws we 



