172 THE EARTH MADE READY FOR MAN 



as your arm grows larger where it meets your body 

 at the shoulder. 



Now suppose you shut your eyes and try to see, 

 not your hand and arm, but a long river flowing to 

 the sea, ever growing l^roader and deepei* as it flows 

 along while it is fed continually by those swift 

 mountain brooks. 



Long, long ago, when the dry land was slowly 

 emerging from the ocean, the streams went rushing 

 to the sea almost as swiftly as the brooks rush off 

 the mountains now, and the fragments which they 

 were carrying along with them cut like a saw, deep 

 into the hard rock of their beds. Just as jewelers 

 cut and polish diamonds with diamond chips and 

 diamond dust, the brooks and young rivers use the 

 fragments they take away from the rocks to cut 

 into and wear away the rock over which they 

 flow. 



It takes a long, long time. So many, many years 

 of rain; so many, many years of water flowing off 

 into* brooks and then into rivers; so many, many 

 years of the grinding and wearing of fragments! 

 But those brooks and rivers have made over the 

 surface of the earth. Things could grow upon it 

 then; just the tiniest bits of lichen at first clinging to 

 the rocks, then mosses and ferns, then trees, and at 

 last animals, as you shall hear later. 



During all this time the land was rising from the 

 sea. How it did this is God's own secret. The 

 rain water with the brooks and rivers helped to make 

 more land, too, by depositing at the shore and in the 

 ocean the great amount of sand and clay they car- 



