﻿Modern Attainments in Geology. 289 



the crossing of a line of folding and his eye finds a 

 repetition of the same in Matotchkin Strait in Nova 

 Zembla. He sees in the Gulf of Pegu (Siam) a longi- 

 tudinal subsidence of the middle part of such a series 

 of folds, and he knows that the city of Vienna is built 

 upon a like smaller depression similar in all its principal 

 characteristics. If he travels from Bohemia to Gorlitz, 

 he recognizes in the Giant Mountains a fragment of 

 the great Variscian curve which once stretched to beyond 

 Lyons. 



Here also a fresh network of ideas is woven. But this 

 is not the final aim of a great science. 



Two things, said Immanuel Kant, above all others, 

 excited his wonder — the starry heavens and the depths of 

 the human mind. 



The child is delighted with the many little lights in the 

 skies of night and gazes uncomprehendingly into the 

 immeasurable depths of the universe. Science teaches us 

 the motions of the stars ; it teaches how small is our earth 

 and how small we ourselves are ; the boldest fancy shrinks 

 before the sublime reality. 



The human mind — each of us guesses its immeasurable 

 depths, but only a few are capable of fathoming these 

 depths, a few to whom earnest studies have granted a true 

 insight into its phenomena. They know more of the inner 

 man than we, we who speak wonderingly of it as a child of 

 the starry heavens. Thrice enviable, however, are those 

 chosen ones to whom it is granted not only to see but to 

 minister to the mind diseased, and who are accompanied 

 to their lives' end by the thanks of saved souls. 



A third wonder is proffered us by geology. Beside the 

 microcosm of man, and the macrocosm in the expanses of 

 the firmament, there is opened to you the unlimited 

 horizon of time. 



The thousands of years of human tradition vanish as 

 moments. How long frost and rain have gnawed at the 



