UNDER THE APPLE-TREES 



On the Pacific Coast of southern CaHfornia I saw 

 a strip of country nearly a hundred miles long and 

 from fifteen to twenty miles wide that was mainly 

 made up of large quartz pebbles. The land was 

 thrown into gentle hills and ridges which became 

 higher as they approached the mountains. Near its 

 inland margin I heard of a search for oil that had 

 been made there, the drill going through nine hun- 

 dred feet of pebbles and striking the granite rock — 

 an unlikely place for oil. But think of the quartz 

 mountains that must have been broken up and put 

 through the mill of the Pacific to form all the vast 

 banks of water- worn pebbles ! 



In South America Darwin saw hills and moun- 

 tains of pure quartz. Not far from Buenos Ayres 

 they formed tablelands or mesas, without cleavage 

 or stratification. On the Falkland Islands he found 

 the hills of quartz and the valleys filled with 

 *' streams of stone" — huge fragments of quartz 

 rock varying in size from a few feet in diameter "to 

 ten or even more than twenty times as much." 

 Darwin thinks that these streams of quartz stones 

 may have had their origin in streams of white lava 

 that had flowed from many parts of the mountains 

 into the valleys, and then, when solidified, were 

 rent by some enormous convulsion into myriads of 

 fragments. Some such titanic force of nature must 

 have been the stone-crusher that converted vast 

 hills of quartz into the fragments that make up the 



52 



