TIME AND CHANGE 
of the earth beneath, and bodying forth a veritable 
history, a warring of the powers of light and dark- 
ness, with the triumph of the angels of light and life, 
makes Milton’s picture seem hollow and unreal. 
The creativeand poetic imagination has undoubtedly 
already reached its high-water mark. We shall prob- 
ably never see the great imaginative works of the 
past surpassed oreven equaled. But in the world of 
scientific discovery and interpretation, we see the 
imagination working in new fields and under new 
conditions, and achieving triumphs that mark a new 
epoch in the history of the race. Nature, which 
once terrified man and made a coward of him, now 
inspires him and fills him with love and enthusiasm. 
The geologist is the interpreter of the records of 
the rocks. From a bit of strata here, and a bit there, 
he re-creates the earth as it was in successive geo- 
logic periods, as Cuvier reconstructed his extinct 
animals from fragments of their bones; and the same 
interpretative power of the imagination is called 
into play in both cases, only the paleontologist has 
a much narrower field to work in, and the back- 
ground of his re-creations must be supplied by the 
geologist. 
Everything connected with the history of the 
earth is on such a vast scale — such a scale of time, 
such a scale of power, such a scale of movement — 
that in trying to measure it by our human standards 
and experience we are like the proverbial child with 
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