TIME AND CHANGE 
restored, one would be lost on his home farm. The 
rocks have melted into soil, as the snow-banks in 
spring melt into water. The rocks that remain are 
like fragments of snow or ice that have so far with- 
stood the weather. Geologists tell us that the great 
Appalachian chain has been in the course of the 
ages reduced almost to a base level or peneplain, 
and then reélevated and its hills and mountains 
carved out anew. 
We change the surface of the earth a little with 
our engineering, drain a marsh, level a hill, sweep 
away a forest, or bore a mountain, but what are 
these compared with the changes that have gone on 
there before our race was heard of? In my native 
mountains, the Catskills, all those peaceful pastoral 
valleys, with their farms and homesteads, lie two 
or three thousand feet below the original surface 
of the land. Could the land be restored again to its 
first condition in Devonian times, probably the 
fields where I hoed corn and potatoes as a boy would 
be buried one or two miles beneath the rocks. 
The Catskills are residual mountains, or what 
Agassiz calls “denudation mountains.” When we 
look at them with the eye of the geologist we see the 
great plateau of tableland of Devonian times out of 
which they were carved by the slow action of the 
sub-aerial forces. They are like the little ridges and 
mounds of soil that remain of your garden-patch 
after the waters of a cloudburst have swept over it. 
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