56 SKETCHES OF CREATION. 



CHAPTER VI. 



OLD OCEAN COMMENCES WORK. 



A THOUSAND years of storm and lightning have 

 passed, and the primeval tempest is drawing to a close. 

 The waters are now permitted to rest upon the surface. 

 By degrees the clouds are exhausted, and sunlight niters 

 through the thinned envelope. As the morning of another 

 geological epoch dawns, it reveals the change of scene. 

 The surface which, in the preceding age, was scorched and 

 arid, is now a universal sea of tepid waters. The earliest 

 ocean enveloped the earth on every hand. A few isolated 

 granite summits perhaps protruded above the watery 

 waste. Around their bases careered the surges which 

 gnawed at their foundations. Geology is unable to aver 

 that any of them survived the denudations of this first de- 

 trital period. The demands of nature for material from 

 which to lay the thick and massive foundations of the 

 stratified pile of rocks were enormous, and it is probable 

 that whole mountains were quarried level by the energies 

 of this young, fresh, and all-embracing ocean. Probably, 

 however, the nuclei of some of our oldest mountain masses, 

 though subsequently elevated to their present altitudes, 

 may be regarded as the remnants of the granite knobs 

 that reared their frowning and angular visages above the 

 primordial deep. If so, the erosion of the waves and the 

 battering of the tempests have given to their sides and 

 heads a smooth and bald rotundity. But most, if not all 

 of the original pinnacles of the earth's crust have been lev- 

 eled to the water's surface and spread over the floor of the 



