132 TIME AND LIFE 



forces of nature have operated with much the same 

 average intensity as at present, and hence the lapse of 

 time which they represent must be something prodigious 

 and inconceivable, or, in the primeval epochs, the natural 

 powers were infinitely more intense than now, and hence 

 the time through which they acted to produce the effects 

 we see was comparatively short. 



The earlier geologists adopted the latter view almost 

 with one consent. For they had little knowledge of the 

 present workings of nature, and they read the records of 

 geologic time as a child reads the history of Rome or 

 Greece, and fancies that antiquity was grand, heroic, and 

 unlike the present because it is unlike his little experience 

 of the present. 



Even so the earlier observers were moved with wonder 

 at the seeming contrast between the ancient and the present 

 order of nature. The elemental forces seemed to have 

 been grander and more energetic in primeval times. Up- 

 heaved and contorted, rifted and fissured, pierced by dykes 

 of molten matter or worn away over vast areas by aqueous 

 action, the older rocks appeared to bear witness to a state 

 of things far different from that exhibited by the peaceful 

 epoch on which the lot of man has fallen. 



But by degrees thoughtful students of geology have 

 been led to perceive that the earliest efforts of nature 

 have been by no means the grandest. Alps and Andes 

 are children of yesterday when compared with Snowdon 

 and the Cumberland hills ; and the so-called glacial epoch 

 that in which perhaps the most extensive physical 

 changes of which any record remains occurred is the 

 last and the newest of the revolutions of the globe. And 

 in proportion as physical geography which is the geology 

 of our own epoch has grown into a science, and the present 

 order of nature has been ransacked to find what, hibernict, 

 we may call precedents for the phenomena of the past, 

 so the apparent necessity of supposing the past to be 

 widely different from the present has diminished. 



The transporting power of the greatest deluge which 

 can be imagined sinks into insignificance beside that of 

 the slowly floating, slowly melting iceberg, or the glacier 

 creeping along at its snail's pace of a yard a day. The 

 study of the deltas of the Nile, the Ganges, and the Missis- 

 sippi has taught us how slow is the wearing action of water, 

 how vast its effects when time is allowed for its operation. 



