TIME AND CHANGE 
fifty feet; the fourth, five hundred feet; and the 
fifth, five hundred feet. The finish at the top shows 
as a heavy crumbling wall, 
probably one hundred feet 
or more high. How the mass 
“ seems to be resisting’ the 
siege of time, throwing out 
its salients here and there, 
and meeting the onset of the foes like a military 
engineer. 
The pyramidal form of these rock-masses is ac- 
counted for by the fact that they were carved out 
from the top downward, and that each successive 
story is vastly older than the one immediately be- 
neath it. The erosive forces have been working 
whole geologic ages longer on the top layer of rock 
than on the bottom layer; hence the topmost ones 
are entirely gone or else reduced to small dimensions. 
But what feature or quality of the rock it is that 
lends itself so readily or so inevitably to these archi- 
tectural forms — the four square foundations, the 
end pilasters and balustrades, and so on — is to 
me not so clear. The peculiar rectangular jointings, 
the alternation of soft and hard layers, the nearly 
horizontal strata, and other things, no doubt, enter 
into the problem. Many of these features are found 
in our older geology of the East, as in the Catskills 
— horizontal strata, hard and soft layers alternat- 
ing, but with the vertical jointing less pronounced; 
54 
