TIME AND CHANGE 
the kind of interest in the country I was most con- 
scious of during my recent trip to the Pacific Coast 
and beyond. Indeed, quite a geologic fever raged in 
me most of the time. The rocks attracted me more 
than the birds, the sculpturing of the landscapes 
engaged my attention more than the improvements 
of the farms — what Nature had done more than 
what man was doing. The purely scenic aspects of 
the country are certainly remarkable, and the 
human aspects interesting, but underneath these 
things, and striking through them, lies a vast 
world of time and change that to me is still more 
remarkable, and still more interesting. I could not 
look out of the car windows without seeing the 
spectre of geologic time stalking across the hills 
and plains. 
As one leaves the prairie States and nears the great 
Southwest, he finds Nature in a new mood — she is 
dreaming of cafions; both cliffs and soil have cafion 
stamped upon them, so that your eye, if alert, is 
slowly prepared for the wonders of rock-carving it 
is to see on the Colorado. The cafion form seems 
inherent in soil and rock. The channels of the little 
streams are cafions, vertical sides of adobe soil, as 
deep as they are broad, rectangle grooves in the 
ground. 
Through all this arid region nature is abrupt, an- 
gular, and sudden — the plain squarely abutting the 
cliff, the cliff walling the cafion; the dry water-course 
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