TII^IE AND CHANGE 



us to grasp geological time as sidereal space. All the 

 standards of measurement furnished us by experi- 

 ence are as inadequate as is a child's cup to measure 

 the ocean. 



Several million years, or one million years, — how 

 can we take it in? We cannot. A hundred years is a 

 long time in human history, and how we pause be- 

 fore a thousand! Then think of ten thousand, of 

 fifty thousand, of one hundred thousand, of ten 

 hundred thousand, or one million, or of one hundred 

 million! What might not the slow but ceaseless 

 creative energy do in that time, changing but a hair 

 in each generation! If our millionaires had to earn 

 their wealth cent by cent, and carry each cent home 

 with them at night, it would be some years before 

 they became millionaires. This is but a faint symbol 

 of the slow process by which nature has piled up her 

 riches. She has had no visions of sudden wealth. To 

 clothe the earth with soil made from the disinte- 

 grated mountains — can we figure that time to our- 

 selves? The Orientals try to get a hint of eternity by 

 saying that when the Himalayas have been ground 

 to powder by allowing a gauze veil to float against 

 them once in a thousand years, eternity will only 

 have just begun. Our mountains have been pul- 

 verized by a process almost as slow. In our case the 

 gauze veil is the air, and the rains, and the snows, 

 before which even granite crumbles. See what the 

 god of erosion, in the shape of water, has done in the 



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