Time and the Geological Record 297 



violence, in many places. Moreover, the earliest life is 

 entirely fragile. Be that as it may, we see today a process 

 of the same nature. Although it appears that there are 

 mountains which were never submerged and oceanbeds never 

 laid dry, that the ridges of great continents hold their places, 

 and the depths of the great oceans; yet the fragments of 

 granite debris which continually drift from the highest 

 mountains need only time to abase them; and the seas to 

 which they drift are not infinitely capacious, and in due 

 course must become less deep, even from this cause, which 

 is not alone in that effect. Natural action, which continues 

 or interrupts the process, does much now by gentle force. 

 At places it is well established that the land is slowly, quietly 

 sinking, perhaps a foot in a century; so that human intelli- 

 gence has not perceived it until a few years ago; and only 

 now do we realize that even that rate, in a thousand 

 centuries, would submerge many a country into a geologic 

 laboratory. Some of these places so sinking, are on a shore 

 where great rivers carry the detritus of a continent. There 

 we may and do see the process of rock making. The sea, 

 where, a little time back (geologically speaking) was shore, 

 is now filling almost as fast as it sinks with a blanket of 

 earth-debris. And upon this will be piled more and more, 

 until a pressure of millions of tons, and a heat which that 

 pressure generates, will renew the solidity of the mass, to 

 be perhaps slowly raised again to Alpine crags, and to begin 

 anew the gravitating journey. Now the sand so settling 

 at this day in the stillness of bays and lagoons, is full of liv- 

 ing things, and of their shells and skeletons. They are being 

 covered up day by day. When they reappear, in thousands 



