THE PLEASURES OF SCIENCE 



geology because it tells me much of the past of my 

 own landscape; it throws light on the methods of 

 Nature; it gives my imagination room to work; the 

 ground underfoot becomes historic; it is like the 

 story of one's own family WTitten large in the val- 

 leys and on the mountains. The rocks that cumber 

 your field are couriers from the geologic ages, the 

 mountains were not always there, and the streams 

 and rivers are as fugitive as the dew. The waterfalls 

 at the heads of the gorges — what stories they tell 

 of time and erosion! And the ledges and caverns are 

 eloquent of ages long gone. I do not look for sermons 

 in stones nor for books in the running brooks, I only 

 look for a page, or a fragment of a page, of earth's 

 history. One picks up a stone with the interest he 

 might feel in picking up a relic on a battle-field; con- 

 tending forces have fought over that ground, not 

 often with shout and uproar, as on human battle- 

 fields, but silently and with the slowness of infinite 

 time. Here is a flint nodule, or an angular fragment 

 of granite rock, or a wave- worn pebble, or a rounded 

 granite boulder, where no other granite is — what a 

 tale of time and change each of these has to tell us 

 if we can but read it! 



I have a paper-weight on my table picked up in a 

 Catskill trout stream. It consists of a wave-worn 

 quartz pebble about the size of a butternut, em- 

 bedded in a hard matrix of gray sand. It is a frag- 

 ment from the conglomerate sandstone that caps 



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