TIME AND CHANGE 
hammers or picks or shovels or of the dynamite ever 
breaks the stillness of the air. 
I have to believe that the valleys and mountains 
of my native Catskills were carved out of a great 
elevated plain or plateau; there is no other explan- 
ation of them. Here lie the level strata, without any 
bending or folding, or sign of convulsion and up- 
heavals, horizontal as the surface of the sea or lake 
in which their sediments were originally laid down; 
and here are these deep, wide valleys cut down 
through these many sheets of stratified rock; and 
here are these long, high, broad-backed mountains, 
made up of the rock that the forces of air and water 
have left, and with no forces of erosion at work 
that would appreciably alter a line of the landscape 
in ten thousand years; and yet we know, if we know 
anything about the physical history of the earth, 
that erosion has done this work, carved out these 
mountains and valleys, from the Devonian strata, 
as literally as the sculptor carves his statue from the 
block of marble. 
Above my lodge on the home farm the vast lay- 
ers of the gray, thin-sheeted Catskill rock crop out 
and look across the valley to their fellows two or 
more miles away where they crop out in a similar 
manner on the opposite slope of the mountain. 
With the eye of faith I see the great sheets restored, 
and follow them across on the line which they made 
zeons ago, till they are joined again to their fellows 
184 
