294 The Age of this Earth. [ May, 
pendous mass of the dolomite mountains: he knows that these 
were all lodged as sedimental matter where they now stand by 
the same water forces which had previously built up the silicious 
Alps; that all the materials of which they are formed were 
brought atom by atom, just as atoms are lodged on our sea-coasts 
to-day, by the waters, which were then deeper than the mount- 
ains are high, from places on the sea-bed which were shallower, 
places that were washed away, and deepened by the very force 
that broke up the coral banks, carried them away, and lodged 
.them where they are. He can form no idea where or when the 
insects lived that gathered all this calcareous matter from their 
water, how long it occupied them in constructing their palaces, 
how long they existed, when they were pulled to pieces, how 
long they were triturated by current and by wave, or when the 
atoms were permitted to become deposits. 
He may look on the calcareous matter of the Jura Mountains 
and know that they are formed from bones and shells of a fauna 
that once lived on land or in the water; he knows that these 
masses were lodged in water as deep as the mountains are high, 
in minute fragments, with an occasional entire shell or an un- 
broken bone, but he knows nothing of the land or water in or on 
which the fauna lived. He cannot count the time occupied in 
the formation of these mountains, or tell for how many ages the 
fauna lived that left their dusts to form them. Wherever the 
physical geographer turns he is lost in the lapse of ages. The 
waters have left their old beds, the land has acquired new dimen- 
sions. All dry lands have their high places, from which their 
water-sheds convey their atoms away; every atom helps to ex- 
tend dry land; the water-sheds are the agents for the work, and 
the great waters are the agents for the separation of matter, and 
for its deposit in its proper place. All this is done now under — 
certain laws by the cosmical agents, air and water. 
No one knows better than the physical geographer the truth 
of the words used by the writer in the Quarterly Review: “ In all 
the operations of nature . . . God worked by law, . . . by the 
process of slow development, by means beautifully simple, involv- 
ing no violence, no haste, yet irresistible.” No one sees more 
clearly the error, ascribed to Professor P. G. Tait, in The Mail, 
8th January, 1877: “ The present state of things has not been 
evolved through infinite past time by the agency of laws now at 
work, but must have had a distinct beginning.” “ When was 1t, 
and what was it ?”’ : 
