TIME AND CHANGE 



degradation seem yet in the heat and burden of the 

 day's toil. Their unfinished landscapes meet the eye 

 on every hand. Many of the mountains look as if 

 they were blocked out but yesterday, and one sees 

 vast naked flood-plains, and painted deserts and 

 bad lands and dry lake-bottoms, that suggest a 

 world yet in the making. 



Some force has scalped the hills, ground the moun- 

 tains, strangled the rivers, channeled the plains, laid 

 bare the succession of geologic ages, stripping off 

 formation after formation like a garment, or cutting 

 away the strata over hundreds of square miles, as 

 we pry a slab from a rock — and has done it all but 

 yesterday. If we break the slab in the prying, and 

 thus secure only part of it, leaving an abrupt jagged 

 edge on the part that remains, we have still a better 

 likeness of the work of these great geologic quarry- 

 men. But other workmen, invisible to our eyes, 

 have carved these jagged edges into novel and beau- 

 tiful forms. 



The East is old, old ! the West, with the exception 

 of the Rocky Mountains, is of yesterday in compari- 

 son. The Hudson was an ancient river before the 

 Mississippi was born, and the Catskills were being 

 slowly carved from a vast plateau while the rocks 

 that were to form many of the Western ranges were 

 being laid down as sediment in the bottom of the 

 sea. California is yet in her teens, while New Eng- 

 land in comparison is an octogenarian. Just as much 



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