TIME AND CHANGE 



I am stirring or turning the meal of a veritable grist 

 of the gods. 



From its primal source in the Archaean rock, up 

 through all the vast series of sedimentary rocks to 

 our own time, what vicissitudes and transforma- 

 tions it has passed through; how many times it has 

 died, so to speak, and been reborn from the rocks; 

 how many times the winds and the rains have trans- 

 ported it, and infused invisible, life-giving gases into 

 it; how many of the elements have throbbed with 

 life, climbed and bloomed in trees, walked or flown 

 or swam in animals, or slumbered for thousands 

 upon thousands of years beneath the great ice-sheet 

 of Pleistocene time! A handful of the soil by your 

 door is probably the most composite thing you can 

 find in a day's journey. It may be an epitome of a 

 whole geological formation, or of two or more of 

 them. If it happens to be made up of decomposed 

 limestone, sandstone, slate, and basalt rock, think 

 what a history would be condensed in it ! 



Our lawns are made up of ashes from the funeral 

 pyre of! mountains, of dust from the tombs of geo- 

 logic ages. What masses of rock does this sandbank 

 represent! what an enormous grist in the great 

 glacier mill do these layers of clay stand for! Two 

 feet of soil probably represent a hundred feet or 

 more of rock. Strictly speaking, the soil is the insol- 

 uble parts of the ground-up and decomposed rocks, 

 after the rains and the winds have done their work 



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