A REMOTE PAST 19 
one of them having a sheer drop of some eighty feet. 
Under the falls are deep pools, beloved of trout, and 
these pools have been worn out of the solid rock by 
the falling water. The bed of the burn is strewn 
with rounded granite boulders, stones which have 
been torn from the hills and worn down into their 
rounded form by constant grinding in the stream. 
The banks of the burn in some places are almost 
vertical cliffs, naturally decorated with innumerable 
ferns and other vegetation. Now, mark you, the 
burn has made its own course ; it has eaten into the 
rocks, carved out its ravines, made its lovely cliffs, 
hollowed out its deep pools, strewn the boulders 
along its bed, and carried millions of tons of material 
to the sea without the aid of engineers and steam 
navvies. <A great part of the most majestic scenery 
of the world has been made by the labours of 
running water. 
T hope [am not wearying you. I-want you to look 
about you with eyes wide open for examples of the 
wonderful work of running water, and frost, and 
wind ; and I want to make you understand that 
these are some of the agents that have destroyed 
continents, and built up new ones from the materials 
of the old. There is no waste in Nature, no real 
destruction. What seems to be destruction is 
simply rearrangement. 
Let us go back in imagination to a very remote 
past ; to a stage in the history of the earth when it 
was a globe of fire-formed or igneous rock, covered 
everywhere by a warm, shallow sea. There were 
no land surfaces then, no torrents, no sands, clays, 
or muds. The rains pelted the surface of the sea. 
