TIME AND CHANGE 
What an astonishing revelation, for instance, that 
the soil was born of the rocks, and is still born of the 
rocks; that every particle of it was once locked up 
in the primitive granite and was unlocked by the 
slow action of the rain and the dews and the snows; 
that the rocky ribs of the earth were clothed with 
this fertile soil out of which we came and to which 
we return by their own decay; that the pulling-down 
of the inorganic meant the building-up of the organic; 
that the death of the crystal meant the birth of the 
cell, and indirectly of you and me and of all that 
lives upon the earth. 
Had there been no soil, had the rocks not decayed, 
there had been no you and me. Such considerations 
have long made me feel a keen interest in geology, 
and especially of late years have stimulated my 
desire to try to see the earth as the geologist sees it. 
I have always had a good opinion of the ground 
underfoot, out of which we all come, and to which 
we all return; and! the story the geologists tell us 
about it is calculated to enhance greatly that good 
opinion. 
I think that if I could be persuaded, as my fathers 
were, that the world was made in six days, by the 
fiat of a supernatural power, I should soon lose my 
interest in it. Such an account of it takes it out of 
the realm of human interest, because it takes it out 
of the realm of natural causation, and places it in the 
realm of the arbitrary, and non-natural. But to 
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