214 EXPLORATION OF THE CANONS OF THE COLORADO. 
tides, or coursing in other channels. Were there canons then? I think not. 
The conditions necessary to the formation of canons are exceptional in the 
world's history. 
We have looked back unnumbered centuries into the past, and seen the 
time when the schists in the depths of the Grand Caiion were first formed as 
sedimentary beds beneath the sea; we have seen this long period followed 
by another of dry land so long that even hundreds, or perhaps thousands, 
of feet of beds were washed away by the rains; and, in turn, followed by 
another period of ocean triumph, so long, that at least ten thousand feet of 
sandstones were accumulated as sediments, when the sea yielded dominion 
to the powers of the air, and the region was again dry land. But aerial 
forces carried away the ten thousand feet of rocks, by a process slow yet 
unrelenting, until the sea again rolled over the land, and more than ten 
thousand feet of rocky beds were built over the bottom of the sea; and then 
again the restless sea retired, and the golden, purple, and black hosts of 
heaven made missiles of their own misty bodies balls of hail, flakes of 
snow, and drops of rain and when the storm of war came, the new rocks 
fled to the sea. Now we have canon gorges and deeply eroded valleys, and 
still the hills are disappearing, the mountains themselves are wasting away, 
the plateaus are dissolving, and the geologist, in the light of the past history 
of the earth, makes prophecy of a time when this desolate land of Titanic 
rocks shall become a valley of many valleys, and yet again the sea will 
invade the land, and the coral animals build their reefs in the infinitesimal 
laboratories of life, and lowly beings shall weave nacre-lined shrouds for 
themselves, and ttie shrouds shall remain entombed in the bottom of the sea, 
when the people shall be changed, by the chemistry of life, into new forms; 
monsters of the deep shall live and die, and their bones be buried in the 
coral sands. Then other mountains and other hills shall be washed into the 
Colorado Sea, and coral reefs, and shales, and bones', and disintegrated 
mountains, shall be made into beds of rock, for a new land, where new 
rivers shall flow. 
Thus ever the land and sea are changing; old lands are buried, and 
new lands are born, and with advancing periods new complexities of rock 
are found; new complexities of life evolved. 
