TIME AND CHANGE 
where we now stand two or more miles of strata have 
been worn away by the winds and rains; that the soil 
of our garden, our farm, represents the ashes of moun- 
tains burned up in the slow fires of the geologic ages. 
Geology first gives us an adequate conception of 
time. The limitations which shut our fathers into 
the narrow close of six thousand years are taken 
down by this great science and we are turned out 
into the open of unnumbered millions of years. Upon 
the background of geologic time our chronological 
time shows no more than a speck upon the sky. 
The whole of human history is but a mere fraction 
of a degree of this mighty arc. The Christian era 
would make but a few seconds of the vast cycle of 
the earth’s history. Geologic time! The words seem 
to ring down through the rocky strata of the earth’s 
crust; they reverberate under the mountains, and 
make them rise and fall like the waves of the sea; 
they open up vistas through which we behold the 
continents and the oceans changing places, and the 
climates of the globe shifting like clouds in the sky; 
whole races and tribes of animal forms disappear 
and new ones come upon the scene. Such a past! 
the imagination can barely skirt the edge of it. 
As the pool in the field is to the sea that wraps the 
earth, so is the time of our histories to the cycle of 
ages in which the geologist reckons the events 
of the earth’s history. 
Through the eyes of the geologist one may look 
90 
