TIME AND CHANGE 



restored, one would be lost on his home farm. The 

 rocks have melted into soil, as the snow-banks in 

 spring melt into water. The rocks that remain are 

 like fragments of snow or ice that have so far with- 

 stood the weather. Geologists tell us that the great 

 Appalachian chain has been in the course of the 

 ages reduced almost to a base level or peneplain, 

 and then reelevated and its hills and mountains 

 carved out anew. 



We change the surface of the earth a little with 

 our engineering, drain a marsh, level a hill, sweep 

 away a forest, or bore a mountain, but what are 

 these compared with the changes that have gone on 

 there before our race was heard of? In my native 

 mountains, the Catskills, all those peaceful pastoral 

 valleys, with their farms and homesteads, lie two 

 or three thousand feet below the original surface 

 of the land. Could the land be restored again to its 

 first condition in Devonian times, probably the 

 fields where I hoed corn and potatoes as a boy would 

 be buried one or two miles beneath the rocks. 



The Catskills are residual mountains, or what 

 Agassiz calls '* denudation mountains." When we 

 look at them with the eye of the geologist we see the 

 great plateau of tableland of Devonian times out of 

 which they were carved by the slow action of the 

 sub-aerial forces. They are like the little ridges and 

 mounds of soil that remain of your garden-patch 

 after the waters of a cloudburst have swept over it. 



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