TIME AND CHANGE 



hammers or picks or shovels or of the dynamite ever 

 breaks the stillness of the air. 



I have to beheve that the valleys and mountains 

 of my native Catskills were carved out of a great 

 elevated plain or plateau; there is no other explan- 

 ation of them. Here lie the level strata, without any 

 bending or folding, or sign of convulsion and up- 

 heavals, horizontal as the surface of the sea or lake 

 in which their sediments were originally laid down; 

 and here are these deep, wide valleys cut down 

 through these many sheets of stratified rock; and 

 here are these long, high, broad-backed mountains, 

 made up of the rock that the forces of air and water 

 have left, and with no forces of erosion at work 

 that would appreciably alter a Hne of the landscape 

 in ten thousand years; and yet we know, if we know 

 anything about the physical history of the earth, 

 that erosion has done this work, carved out these 

 mountains and valleys, from the Devonian strata, 

 as Uterally as the sculptor carves his statue from the 

 block of marble. 



Above my lodge on the home farm the vast lay- 

 ers of the gray, thin-sheeted Catskill rock crop out 

 and look across the valley to their fellows two or 

 more miles away where they crop out in a similar 

 manner on the opposite slope of the mountain. 

 With the eye of faith I see the great sheets restored, 

 and follow them across on the line which they made 

 seons ago, till they are joined again to their fellows 



184 



