TIME AND CHANGE 
degradation seem yet in the heat and burden of the 
day’s toil. Their unfinished landscapes meet the eye 
on every hand. Many of the mountains look as if 
they were blocked out but yesterday, and one sees 
vast naked flood-plains, and painted deserts and 
bad lands and dry lake-bottoms, that suggest a 
world yet in the making. 
Some'force has scalped the hills, ground the moun- 
tains, strangled the rivers, channeled the plains, laid 
bare the succession of geologic ages, stripping off 
formation after formation like a garment, or cutting 
away the strata over hundreds of square miles, as 
we pry a slab from a rock — and has done it all but 
yesterday. If we break the slab in the prying, and 
thus secure only part of it, leaving an abrupt jagged 
edge on the part that remains, we have still a better 
likeness of the work of these great geologic quarry- 
men. But other workmen, invisible to our eyes, 
have carved these jagged edges into novel and beau- 
tiful forms. 
The East is old, old! the West, with the exception 
of the Rocky Mountains, is of yesterday in compari- 
son. The Hudson was an ancient river before the 
Mississippi was born, and the Catskills were being 
slowly carved from a vast plateau while the rocks 
that were to form many of the Western ranges were 
being laid down as sediment in the bottom of the 
sea. California is yet in her teens, while New Eng- 
land in comparison is an octogenarian. Just as much 
40 
