THROUGH THE GEOLOGIST’S EYES 
upon his native hills and see them as they were in- 
calculable ages ago, and as they probably will be 
incalculable ages ahead; those hills, so unchanging 
during his lifetime, and during a thousand lifetimes, 
he may see as flitting as the cloud shadows upon the 
landscape. Out of the dark abyss of geologic time 
there come stalking the ghosts of lost mountains and 
lost hills and valleys and plains, or lost rivers and 
lakes, yea, of lost continents; we see a procession of 
the phantoms of strange and monstrous beasts, 
many of them colossal in size and fearful in form, 
and among the minor forms of this fearful troop of 
spectres we see the ones that carried safely forward, 
through the vicissitudes of those ages, the precious 
impulse that was to eventuate in the human race. 
Only the geologist knows the part played by ero- 
sion in shaping the earth’s surface as we see it. He 
sees, I repeat, the phantoms of vanished hills and 
mountains all about us. He sees their shadow forms 
wherever he looks. He follows out the lines of the 
flexed or folded strata where they come to the sur- 
face, and thus sketches in the air the elevation that 
has disappeared. In some places he finds that the 
valleys have become hills and the hills have become 
valleys, or that the anticlines and synclines, as he 
calls them, have changed places — as a result of the 
unequal hardness of the rocks. Over all the older 
parts of the country the original features have been 
so changed by erosion that, could they be suddenly 
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