THROUGH THE GEOLOGIST’S EYES 
the process was so slow that the river sawed down 
through the rock as fast as it came up. Nearly all 
the great cosmic and terrestrial changes and revolu- 
tions are veiled from us by this immeasurable lapse 
of time. 
Any prediction about the permanence of the land 
as we know it, or as the race has known it, or of our 
immunity from earthquakes or volcanic eruptions, 
or of a change of climate, or of any cosmic catas- 
trophe, based on human experience, is vain and 
worthless. What is or has been in man’s time is 
no criterion as to what will be in God’s time. The 
periods of great upheaval and deformation in the 
earth’s crust appear to be separated by millions of 
years. Away back in pre-Cambrian times, there 
appear to have been immense periods during which 
the peace and repose of the globe were as profound 
as in our own time. Then at theend of Palzozoic 
time — how many millions of years is only con- 
jectural —the truce of eons was broken, and the 
dogs of war let loose; it was a period of revolution 
which resulted in the making of one of our greatest 
mountain-systems, the Appalachian, and in an un- 
precedented extinction of species. Later eras have 
witnessed similar revolutions. Why may they not 
come again? The shrinking of the cooling globe 
must still go on, and this shrinking must give rise to 
surface disturbances and dislocations, maybe in the 
uplift of new mountain-ranges from the sea-bot- 
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