TIME AND CHANGE 
written over with the history of the passing of the 
great ice plane. The surface exposed is ten or twelve 
feet long, and four or five feet wide, and it is as 
straight and smooth, and the scratches and grooves 
are as sharp and distinct as if made yesterday. I 
often take the college girls there who come to visit 
me, to show them, as I tell them, where the old ice 
gods left their signatures. The girls take turns in 
stooping down and looking along the under surface 
of the rock, and feeling it with their hands, and 
marveling. They have read or heard about these 
things, but the reading or hearing made little im- 
pression upon their minds. When they see a con- 
crete example, and feel it with their hands, they are 
impressed. Then when I tell them that there is not 
a shadow of a doubt but that the ice was at one time 
two or three thousand feet thick above the place 
where they now stand, and that it bore down upon 
Julian’s Rock with a weight of thousands of tons to 
the square foot, that it filled all the Hudson River 
Valley, and covered the landscape for thousands of 
miles around them, riding over the tops of the Cat- 
skills and of the Adirondacks, and wearing them 
down and carrying fragments of rock torn from 
them hundreds of miles to the south and southwest, 
—when I have told them all of this, I have usually 
given them a mouthful too big for them to masticate 
or swallow. As a sort of abstract proposition con- 
tained in books, or heard in the classroom, they do 
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