TIME AND CHANGE 
us to grasp geological time as sidereal space. All the 
standards of measurement furnished us by experi- 
ence are as inadequate as is a child’s cup to measure 
the ocean. 
Several million years, or one million years, — how 
can we take it in? We cannot. A hundred years is a 
long time in human history, and how we pause be- 
fore a thousand! Then think of ten thousand, of 
fifty thousand, of one hundred thousand, of ten 
hundred thousand, or one million, or of one hundred 
million! What might not the slow but-ceaseless 
creative energy do in that time, changing but a hair 
in each generation! If our millionaires had to earn 
their wealth cent by cent, and carry each cent home 
with them at night, it would be some years before 
they became millionaires. This is but a faint symbol 
of the slow process by which nature has piled up her 
riches. She has had no visions of sudden wealth. To 
clothe the earth with soil made from the disinte- 
grated mountains — can we figure that time to our- 
selves? The Orientals try to get a hint of eternity by 
saying that when the Himalayas have been ground 
to powder by allowing a gauze veil to float against 
them once in a thousand years, eternity will only 
have just begun. Our mountains have been pul- 
verized by a process almost as slow. In our case the 
gauze veil is the air, and the rains, and the snows, 
before which even granite crumbles. See what the 
god of erosion, in the shape of water, has done in the 
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