UNDER THE APPLE-TREES 
On the Pacific Coast of southern California I saw 
a strip of country nearly a hundred miles long and 
from fifteen to twenty miles wide that was mainly 
made up of large quartz pebbles. The land was 
thrown into gentle hills and ridges which became 
higher as they approached the mountains. Near its 
inland margin I heard of a search for oil that had 
been made there, the drill going through nine hun- 
dred feet of pebbles and striking the granite rock — 
an unlikely place for oil. But think of the quartz 
mountains that must have been broken up and put 
through the mill of the Pacific to form all the vast 
banks of water-worn pebbles! 
In South America Darwin saw hills and moun- 
tains of pure quartz. Not far from Buenos Ayres 
they formed tablelands or mesas, without cleavage 
or stratification. On the Falkland Islands he found 
the hills of quartz and the valleys filled with 
“streams of stone” — huge fragments of quartz 
rock varying in size from a few feet in diameter “to 
ten or even more than twenty times as much.” 
Darwin thinks that these streams of quartz stones 
may have had their origin in streams of white lava 
that had flowed from many parts of the mountains 
into the valleys, and then, when solidified, were 
rent by some enormous convulsion into myriads of 
fragments. Some such titanic force of nature must 
have been the stone-crusher that converted vast 
hills of quartz into the fragments that make up the 
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