CHAPTER II 



Geological Principles 



When we visit the Garden of the Gods and learn the history of 

 the beautiful and weird shaped masses of red sandstone to which 

 the locality owes its romantic name — how they were deposited 

 originally as loose sands in horizontal beds, were subsequently 

 solidified and bent by the forces that built the Rocky Mountains 

 so that the original horizontal bedding became perpendicular, and 

 were subsequently carved to their present proportions from solid 

 sheets of rock by the slow action of rain, wind and frost, it may 

 readily be believed that strange and unknown forces of great 

 magnitude were operative in past times. The same feeling is 

 aroused by the grandeur of the Grand Canon of the Colorado or 

 by the columnar lava of Fingalls Cave and the Giants Causeway, 

 or even by the majestic lava sheet that forms the Palisades of the 

 Hudson. And if we have ever seen the overturned folds of rock 

 common in most mountain regions or especially the great double 

 fold in the Glarner Alps south of Lake Zurich, we may feel justi- 

 fied in concluding that very different and titanic physical forces 

 were operative on the earth before the advent of man, just as we 

 know gigantic animals flourished in past geologic times and just 

 as the plants alhed to our modern lowly club mosses and mares 

 tails were tall trees during the coal period. 



This is exactly what the earlier students of the earth thought. 

 When they found the remains of marine shells in the rocks of the 

 mountain tops they concluded that vast caverns in the earth's 

 crust had swallowed the waters of the primeval universal ocean. 

 When knowledge had progressed so that men knew that the traces 

 of former life in each succeeding layer of rocks differed from all 

 others both earlier and later they concluded that mighty cataclysms 

 or revolutions of nature had repeatedly swept the life ofif of the 

 face of the earth and that each time this had happened it had been 

 subsequently renewed by special divine creations. 



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