TIME AND CHANGE 
I am stirring or turning the meal of a veritable grist 
of the gods. 
From its primal source in the Archzean rock, up 
through all the vast series of sedimentary rocks to 
our own time, what vicissitudes and transforma- 
tions it has passed through; how many times it has 
died, so to speak, and been reborn from the rocks; 
how many times the winds and the rains have trans- 
ported it, and infused invisible, life-giving gases into 
it; how many of the elements have throbbed with 
life, climbed and bloomed in trees, walked or flown 
or swam in animals, or slumbered for thousands 
upon thousands of years beneath the great ice-sheet 
of Pleistocene time! A handful of the soil by your 
door is probably the most composite thing you can 
find in a day’s journey. It may be an epitome of a 
whole geological formation, or of two or more of 
them. If it happens to be made up of decomposed 
limestone, sandstone, slate, and basalt rock, think 
what a history would be condensed in it! 
Our lawns are made up of ashes from the funeral 
pyre of| mountains, of dust from the tombs of geo- 
logic ages. What masses of rock does this sandbank 
represent! what an enormous grist in the great 
glacier mill do these layers of clay stand for! Two 
feet of soil probably represent a hundred feet or 
more of rock. Strictly speaking, the soil is the insol- 
uble parts of the ground-up and decomposed rocks, 
after the rains and the winds have done their work 
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