THROUGH THE GEOLOGIST’S EYES 
takes on new wrinkles. Just why the earth’s crust 
should wrinkle along lines of rock of such enormous 
thickness is not alittle puzzling. But we are told it 
is because this heavy mass of sediment presses the 
sea-bottom down till the rocks are fused'by the in- 
ternal heat of the earth and thus a line of weakness 
is established. In any case the earth’s forces act 
as a whole, and the earth’s crust at the thickest 
points is so comparatively thin — probably not 
much more than a heavy sheet of cardboard over 
a six-inch globe — that these forces seem to go their 
own way regardless of such minor differences. 
The Alps and the Himalayas, much younger than 
our Appalachians, were also begotten and nursed in 
the cradle of a vast geosyncline in the Tertiary seas. 
We speak of the birth of a mountain-range in terms 
of a common human occurrence, or as if it were an 
event that might be witnessed, measurable in hu- 
man years or days, whereas it is an event measurable 
only in geologic periods, and geologic periods are 
marked off only on the dial-face of eternity. The 
old Hebrew writer gave but a faint image of it when 
he said that with the Lord a thousand years are as 
one day; it is hardly one hour of the slow beat of 
that clock whose hours mark the periods of the 
earth’s development. 
The whole long period during which the race of 
man has been rushing about, tickling and scratch- 
ing and gashing the surface of the globe, would make 
95 
