546 HISTORY OF PASADENA. 



clock beats centuries for seconds — and the uplift may not have averaged 

 more than one inch in a hundred years. The good book says, "With God 

 a thousand years are as one day ;" and here we discern the polytechnics of 

 his world-making work,* 



Earthquakes, and especially the California "tremblers," have an im- 

 portant place in the geological mechanism b}^ which the Pasadena moun- 

 tains were made. I presume all of j'ou have at some time in your life heard 

 the cracking sound of timbers or boards in a framed house when they were 

 in process of contracting by cold during a frosty night. Or you have heard 

 the snapping and cracking sound of a stove or stovepipe when cooling off. 

 Well, that was a little earthquake — a phenomenon on a small scale precisely 

 similar in principle to the earth tremblings which occur in California occa- 

 sionally and are overdignified by the terrifjdng name of earthquake. The 

 contractile pressure of the earth's crust in its cooling process has somewhere 

 caused a crack, a fracture — and the earthquake is simply the jar produced 

 by that tension click of the earth's rocky 'encasement — the fracture being 

 generally, but not always, beneath the ocean or near a junction of land and 

 sea. The extent of the earthquake, and its effects on land and sea in any 

 given case, will of course depend upon the amount of rock displacement 

 caused at the time ; sometimes it is so little — perhaps onlj^ a hair's breadth 

 — that there is only a faint sense of trembling ; while at other times there 

 will be one or more sharp shocks, and sometimes great and destructive com- 

 motion in the ocean's waters, as- occurred on the coast of South America a 

 few years ago. And every time one of these shocks occurs it is a stroke of 

 God's great hammer forging another link in the might}' mountain chain 

 around the earth. f 



Our Pasadena mountain rocks were formed in layers beneath the ocean, 

 from the disintegration and pulping of other and older rocks during an age 

 when the ocean extended to the Sierra Nevada mountains and had the great 

 Mohave desert for its sandy floor. Our rocks were formed by the joint 

 action of heat and water, or in a bath of superheated steam under great 

 pressure — thus giving them sometimes the appearance of aqueous and 

 sometimes igneous rocks, but always marked as metamorphic rocks. It 

 was the intensity of compression that gave the heat, and not the fire of 

 combustion as in volcanic and primitive rocks ; and this pressure heat was 

 continued through centuries upon centuries of time. Hence these are 

 jellied rocks — cooked rocks — or metamorphosed by the prolonged intense 

 moist heat into a composite magma, in quality and relation of parts con- 

 siderably different from their original condition when deposited as sediment 

 on the ocean floor — and further changed in their crystallizing during the 

 process of cooling, according as it went on slowly or rapidly in the different 

 layers, either before or after their terrestrial uplift. Therefore all fossils, if 

 they ever contained any, have been cooked into vapor and diffused undis- 

 tinguishably through the common mass. Thus, too, the gold that is found 

 was vaporized from older rocks below, and in part from the sea water itself, 



*" The latter part of the Tertiary period has been the great mountain-building epoch in the earth's 

 history. The principal part of the elevation of the Andes and the Rocky Mountains has taken place 

 since the middle of the Tertiary period. * * * A considerable portion of this elevation of the chiefest 

 mountain systems of the world occurred in what would be called post-Tertiary time — that is, has been 

 coincident with a portion of the Glacial period." — " Man and the Glacial Peyiod," p. 328 : International 

 Scientific Series No. 69 ; 1892. 



t" The frequent earthquakes on the Pacific coast tmke it not at all improbable that the process of 

 elevation is still going on."— Prof O. F. Wright, on " Prehistoric Man on the Pacific Coast," in Atlantic 

 Monthly, Aptil, iSgi. 



