GEOLOGY 



2442 



GEOLOGY 



earth pursues its unceasing course around the 

 sun. It is possible that there will be another 

 era in which man's spiritual and intellectual 

 development will be comparable to the great 

 physical and biologic evolutions of the past. 



Geology and Mythology. We say, sometimes, 

 without realizing that we are using figures of 

 speech, that a volcano breathes out smoke; 

 that the waves are angry; that a mountain 

 lifts its head among the clouds; that the wind 

 whistles; that the clouds threaten. With us, 

 they are only figures of speech, but in the 

 early days such expressions were more than 

 that. The ancient Greeks and Romans lived 

 in a region whose geological features could not 

 be overlooked. It was no flat prairie country, 

 the same to the north as to the south. There 

 were mountains and mountain streams; there 

 were volcanoes and earthquakes; there were 

 chasms and rivers and deep, still lakes and the 

 restless, wind-tossed sea; and for all of those 

 things the active minds of the Greeks and 

 Romans had to find explanations. To those 

 ancient peoples everything was alive, not with 

 merely human life, but with the life of gods. 

 A man might blow a basin of water and make 

 little waves upon it; what, then, more natural 

 than that the wind, so like, on a large scale, 

 the blowing out of a man's breath, should be 

 the breath of some great god? 



So they accounted for all the facts in nature 

 which they saw about them. If they rose in 

 the morning and found that the sea had be- 

 come very stormy during the night and was 

 hurling its great waves up on the shore, they 

 felt that the sea god was angry, and they made 

 offerings to him to buy back his favor. Any- 

 thing so unusual as an earthquake or a vol- 

 canic eruption needed a very special explana- 

 tion, so they invented histories that reached 

 far back into the past, telling how the gods 

 became angry with some huge giant and buried 

 him under a mountain. His breath was the 

 smoke of the volcano; his struggles to escape 

 caused the earthquakes. A deep chasm or hole 

 in the ground showed where some god had 

 struck his spear, either in anger or because 

 he wanted to get to the regions below the earth 

 without taking a long way round. See 

 MYTHOLOGY. E.S. 



Consult Dana's Geological Story Briefly Told; 

 Goodrich's Wonders of Geology; Heilprin's The 

 Earth and Its Story (a first book in geology) ; 

 Klngsley's Madam How and Why First Lessons 

 in Earth Lore. 



Related Subjects. In addition to the follow- 

 ing articles, which bear directly upon geology in 



some of its phases, these volumes contain many 

 articles which are more or less closely related to 

 the general subject. For these the reader is re- 

 ferred to lists under GEOGRAPHY ; METALS ; MIN- 

 ERALS AND MINERALOGY. 



Bell, Robert 



Dana, James Dwight 



Dawson, Sir John 



William 



Geikie, Sir Archibald 

 Heilprin, Angelo 

 King, Clarence 

 Le Conte, Joseph 



Lyell, Sir Charles 

 Muir, John 

 Powell, John Wesley 

 Shaler, Nathaniel S. 

 Tyndall, John 

 Van Hise, Charles 



Richard 

 Winchell, Alexander 



PHYSIOGRAPHIC TOPICS 



Air 



Alluvium 



Canyon 



Climate 



Coastal Plain 



Delta 



Desert 



Divide 



Dust, Atmospheric 



Earth 



Earthquake 



Fall Line 



Geyser 



Glacier 



Hill 



Island 



Lake 



Mountain 



Ocean 



Physical Geography 



Plateau 



Talus 



Tides 



Tornado 



Valley 



Volcano 



Wind 



