TIME AND CHANGE 



of the earth beneath, and bodying forth a veritable 

 history, a warring of the powers of Ught and dark- 

 ness, with the triumph of the angels of light and life, 

 makes Milton's picture seem hollow and unreal. 

 The creative and poetic imagination has undoubtedly 

 already reached its high- water mark. We shall prob- 

 ably never see the great imaginative works of the 

 past surpassed or even equaled. But in the world of 

 scientific discovery and interpretation, we see the 

 imagination working in new fields and under new 

 conditions, and achieving triumphs that mark a new 

 epoch in the history of the race. Nature, which 

 once terrified man and made a coward of him, now 

 inspires him and fills him with love and enthusiasm. 

 The geologist is the interpreter of the records of 

 the rocks. From a bit of strata here, and a bit there, 

 he re-creates the earth as it was in successive geo- 

 logic periods, as Cuvier reconstructed his extinct 

 animals from fragments of their bones; and the same 

 interpretative power of the imagination is called 

 into play in both cases, only the palaeontologist has 

 a much narrower field to work in, and the back- 

 ground of his re-creations must be •supplied by the 

 geologist. 



Everything connected with the history of the 

 earth is on such a vast scale — such a scale of time, 

 such a scale of power, such a scale of movement — 

 that in trying to measure it by our human standards 

 and experience we are like the proverbial child with 



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