THROUGH THE GEOLOGIST’S EYES 
the geologists give me the impression that this is 
what we are to believe. 
Chamberlin and Salisbury, in their recent col- 
lege geology, teach that each new formation implies 
the destruction of an equivalent amount of older 
rock — every system being entirely built up out of 
the older one beneath it. Lyell and Dana teach the 
same thing. If this were true, could there have been 
any continental growth at all? Could a city grow 
by the process of pulling down the old buildings for 
material to build the new? If the geology is correct, 
I fail to see how there would be any more land sur- 
face to-day then there was in Archean times. Each 
new formation would only have replaced the old 
from which it came. The Silurian would only have 
made good the waste of the Cambrian, and the De- 
vonian made good the waste of the Silurian, and so 
on to the top of the series, and in the end we should 
still have been at the foot of the stairs. That vast 
interior sea that in Archzean times stretched from 
the rudimentary Appalachian Mountains to the 
rudimentary Rocky Mountains, and which is now 
the heart of the continent, would still have been a 
part of the primordial ocean. But instead of that, 
this sea is filled and piled up with sedimentary rocks 
thousands of feet thick, that have given birth on 
their surfaces to thousands of square miles of as 
fertile soil as the earth holds. 
That the original crystalline rocks played the 
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