CORNELL
UNIVERSITY
LIBRARY

 

GIFT OF

THE FORD MOTOR
COMPANY FUND

UNDERGRADUATE LIBRARY

 

 

 

 
| a a Library
PS 1224.T5 19

-R
 

Ribersive Edition

 

THE WRITINGS OF
JOHN BURROUGHS
VOLUME XVI

5
Chig Ldition is limited te One Chougand Sets
 
THE WRITINGS OF
JOHN BURROUGHS

‘ine Civition

 

 
TIME AND CHANGE

BY

JOHN BURROUGHS

 

BOSTON AND NEW YORK

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
Che Kiiherside Pres¢ Cambridge
Ig1z
COPYRIGHT, 1912, BY JOHN BURROUGHS

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

”

Published October 1g12
PREFACE

SUSPECT that in this volume my reader will

feel that I have given him a stone when he asked
for bread, and his feeling in this respect will need no
apology. I fear there is more of the matter of hard
science and of scientific speculation in this collec-
tion than of spiritual and sesthetic nutriment; but
I do hope the volume is not entirely destitute of the
latter. If I have not in some degree succeeded in
transmuting my rocks into a kind of wholesome
literary bread, or, to vary the figure, in turning them
into a soil in which some green thing or flower of
human interest and emotion may take root and
grow, then, indeed, have I come short of the end
I had in view.

I am well aware that my own interest in geology
far outruns my knowledge, but if I can in some de-
gree kindle that interest in my reader, I shall be
putting him on the road to a fuller knowledge than
I possess. As with other phases of nature, I have
probably loved the rocks more than I have studied
them. In my youth I delighted in lingering about
and beneath the ledges of my native hills, partly in
the spirit of adventure and a boy’s love of the wild,
and partly with an eye to their curious forms, and

Vv
PREFACE

the evidences of immense time that looked out from
their gray and crumbling fronts. I was in the pre-
sence of Geologic Time, and was impressed by the
scarred and lichen-coated veteran without knowing
who or what he was. But he put a spell upon me
that has deepened as the years have passed, and
now my boyhood ledges are more interesting to me
than ever.

If one gains an interest in the history of the earth,
he is quite sure to gain an interest in the history of
the life on the earth. If the former illustrates the
theory of development, so must the latter. The
geologist is pretty sure to be an evolutionist. As
science turns over the leaves of the great rocky
volume, it sees the imprint of animals and plants
upon them and it traces their changes and the ap-
pearance of new species from age to age. The bio-
logic tree has grown and developed as the geologic
soil in which it is rooted has deepened and ripened.
I am sure I was an evolutionist in the abstract, or
by the quality and complexion of my mind, before
I read Darwin, but to become an evolutionist in
the concrete, and accept the doctrine of the ani-
mal origin of man, has not for me been an easy
matter.

The essays ‘on the subject in this volume are
the outcome of the stages of brooding and think-
ing which I have gone through in accepting this
doctrine. I am aware that there is much repeti-

vi
PREFACE

tion in them, but maybe on that very account
they will help my reader to go along with me
over the long road we have to travel to reach this
conclusion.

July, 1912.
CONTENTS

. Taz Lona Roap. . . . . .. 21
Toe Divine Apyss . . . . . . 389
. Tue Spec. or tan YOsEMITH Oe Oa OT
. TurovucH Tas Eyres or THE GEOLOGIST . 85
. Hotmays in Hawan a oe. we we See. re LTD
Toe Orn Ick Fuoop . . .« «SC «ST

Toe Frmenpiy Som . . . . . « 167
Prmau ENpeRGIES. . . . . |. . 171
. Screntipic Fairh ~. . ww etiett«<aCS*d'
“Tae Worm stRivine To BE Man” . . 187
Tue PaaNTOMS BEHIND US». Cte «dN

Tur Hazarps or tHe Past . . . . 225

EReaut Base tHe e

. Tue Gospet or NATURE. . . . « 243
InpEX. «1 ee ee tw QUE

The frontispiece is from the photograph of Mr. Burroughs
taken by Edward B. Greene, 1909, and the vignette of Slabsides
is from a photograph by Charles S. Olcott, 1912.
TIME AND CHANGE

I
THE LONG ROAD

I

HE long road I have in mind is the long road of
evolution, — the road you and I have traveled
in the guise of humbler organisms, from the first uni-
cellular life in the old Cambrian seas to the complex
and highly specialized creature that rules supreme in
the animal kingdom to-day. Surely a long journey,
stretching through immeasurable epochs of geologic
time, and attended by vicissitudes of which we can
form but feeble conceptions.

The majority of readers, I fancy, are not yet ready
to admit that they, or any of their forebears, have
ever made such a journey. We have all long been
taught that our race was started upon its career only
a few thousand years ago, started, not amid the war-
rings of savage elemental nature, but in a pleasant
garden with everything needed close at hand. This
belief has faded a good deal in our time, especially
among thoughtful persons; but in a modified form,
as the special creation theory, it held sway in the
minds of the older naturalists like Agassiz and Daw-

1
TIME AND CHANGE

son, long after Darwin had launched his revolution-
ary doctrine of our animal origin, putting man in the
same zoological scheme as the lower orders.

We are slow to adjust our minds to the revelations
of science, they have been so long adjusted toa revel-
ation, so-called, of an entirely different character.
It gives them a wrench more or less violent when we
try to make them at home and at their ease amid
these new and startling disclosures. To many good
people evolution seems an ungodly doctrine, like
setting up a remorseless logic in the place of an om-
nipresent Creator. But there is no help for it. Sci-
ence has fairly turned us out of our comfortable little
anthropomorphic notion of things into the great
out-of-doors of the universe. We must and will get
used to the chill, yea, to the cosmic chill, if need be.
Our religious instincts will be all the hardier for it.

When we accepted Newton’s discovery of the
force called gravitation, we virtually surrendered
ourselves to the enemy, and started upon a.road,
the road of natural causation, that traverses the
whole system of created things. We cannot turn
back; we may lie down by the roadside and dream
our old dreams, but our children and their children
will press on, and will be exhilarated by the journey.

It is at first sight an unpalatable truth that evo-
lution confronts us with, and it requires courage
calmly to face it. But it is in perfect keeping with
the whole career of physical science, which is forever

2
THE LONG ROAD

directing our attention to common near-at-hand
facts for the key to remote and mysterious occur-
rences.

It seems to me that evolution adds greatly to the
wonder of life, because it takes it out of the realm of
the arbitrary, the exceptional, and links it to the se-
quence of natural causation. That man should have
been brought into existence by the fiat of an omni-
potent power is less an occasion for wonder than
that he should have worked his way up from the
lower non-human forms. That the manward im-
pulse should never have been lost in all the appalling
vicissitudes of geologic time, that it should have
pushed steadily on, through mollusk and fish and am-
phibian and reptile, through swimming and creeping
and climbing things, and that the forms that con-
veyed it should have escaped the devouring mon-
sters of the earth, sea, and air till it came to its full
estate in a human being, is the wonder of wonders.

In like manner, evolution raises immensely the
value of the biological processes that are every-
where operative about us, by showing us that these
processes are the channels through which the crea-
tive energy has worked, and is still working. Not in
the far-off or in the exceptional does it seek the key
to man’s origin, but in the sleepless activity of the
creative force, which has been pushing onward and
upward, from the remotest time, till it has come to
full fruition in man.

3
TIME AND CHANGE

It is easy to inject into man’s natural history a
supernatural element, as nearly all biologists and
anthropologists before Darwin’s time did, and as
many serious people still do. It is too easy, in fact,
and the temptation to do so is great. It makes short
work of the problem of man’s origin, and saves a
deal of trouble. But this method is more and more
discredited, and the younger biologists and natural
philosophers accept the zodlogical conception of
man, which links him with all the lower forms, and
proceed to work from that.

When we have taken the first step in trying to
solve the problem of man’s origin, where can we
stop ? Can we find any point in his history where we
can say, Here his natural history ends, and his su-
pernatural history begins ? Does his natural history
end with the pre-glacial man, with the cave man, or
the river-drift man, with the low-browed, long-jawed
fossil man of Java, — Pithecanthropus erectus, de-
scribed by Du Bois? Where shall we stop on his
trail? I had almost said “step on his tail,” for we
undoubtedly, if we go back far enough, come to a
time when man had a tail. ‘Every unborn child at a
certain stage of its development still has a tail, as it
also has a coat of hair and a hand-like foot. But
could we stop with the tailed man — the manlike
ape, or the apelike man? Did his Creator start him
with this appendage, or was it a later suffix of his
own invention ?

4
THE LONG ROAD

If we once seriously undertake to solve the riddle
of man’s origin, and go back along the line of his de-
scent, I doubt if we can find the point, or the form,
where the natural is supplanted by the supernatural
as it is called, where causation ends and miracle be-
gins. Even the first dawn of protozoic life in the pri-
mordial seas must have been natural, or it would not
have occurred, — must have been potential in what
went before it. In this universe, so far as we know
it, one thing springs from another; the sequence of
cause and effect is continuous and inviolable.

We know that no man is born of full stature,
with his hat and boots on; we know that he grows
from an infant, and we know the infant grows from
a foetus, and that the foetus grows from a bit of
nucleated protoplasm in the mother’s womb. Why
may not the race of man grow from a like simple
beginning? It seems to be the order of nature; it is
the order of nature, — first the germ, the inception,
then the slow growth from the simple to the com-
plex. It is the order of our own thoughts, our own
arts, our own civilization, our own language.

In our candid moments we acknowledge the ani-
mal in ourselves and in our neighbors, — especially
in our neighbors, — the beast, the shark, the hog,
the sloth, the fox, the monkey; but to accept the
notion of our animal origin, that gives us pause. To
believe that our remote ancestor, no matter how
remote in time or space, was a lowly organized crea-

5
TIME AND CHANGE

ture living in the primordial seas with no more
brains than a shovel-nosed shark or a gar-pike, puts
our scientific faith to severe test.

Think of it. For countless ages, millions upon
millions of years, we see the earth swarming with
life, low bestial life, devouring and devoured, myri-
ads of forms, all in bondage to nature or natural
forces, living only to eat and to breed, localized,
dependent upon place and clime, shaped to specific
ends like machines, — to fly, to swim, to climb, to
run, to dig, to drill, to weave, to wade, to graze, to
crush, — knowing not what they do, as void of con-
scious purpose as the thorns, the stings, the hooks,
the coils, and the wings in the vegetable world, mak-
ing no impression upon the face of nature, as much
a part of it as the trees and the stones, species after
species having its day, and then passing off the
stage, when suddenly, in the day before yesterday in
the geologic year, so suddenly as to give some color
of truth to the special creation theory, a new and
strange animal appears, with new and strange pow-
ers, separated from the others by what appears an
impassable gulf, less specialized in his bodily powers
than the others, but vastly more specialized in his
brain and mental powers, instituting a new order of
things upon the earth, the face of which he in time
changes through his new gift of reason, inventing
tools and weapons and language, harnessing the
physical forces to his own ends, and putting all

6
THE LONG ROAD

things under his feet, — man the wonder-worker,
the beholder of the stars, the critic and spectator of
creation itself, the thinker of the thoughts of God,
the worshiper, the devotee, the hero, spreading
rapidly over the earth, and developing with pro-
digious strides when once fairly launched upon his
career. Can it be possible, we ask, that this god was
fathered by the low bestial orders below him, — in-
stinct giving birth to reason, animal ferocity devel-
oping into human benevolence, the slums of nature
sending forth the ruler of the earth. It is a hard
proposition, I say, undoubtedly the hardest that
science has ever confronted us with.

Haeckel, discussing this subject, suggests that it is
the parvenu in us that is reluctant to own our lowly
progenitors, the pride of family and position, like
that of would-be aristocratic sons who conceal the
humble origin of their parents. But it is more than
that; it is the old difficulty of walking by faith where
there is nothing visible to walk upon: we lack faith
in the efficiency of the biologic laws, or any mun-
dane forces, to bridge the tremendous chasm that
separates man from even the highest of the lower
orders. His radical unlikeness to all the forms below
him, as if he moved in a world apart, into which
they could never enter, as in a sense he does, is
where the difficulty lies. Moreover, evolution balks
us because of the inconceivable stretch of time dur-
ing which it has been at work. It is as impossible for

q
TIME AND CHANGE

us to grasp geological time as sidereal space. All the
standards of measurement furnished us by experi-
ence are as inadequate as is a child’s cup to measure
the ocean.

Several million years, or one million years, — how
can we take it in? We cannot. A hundred years is a
long time in human history, and how we pause be-
fore a thousand! Then think of ten thousand, of
fifty thousand, of one hundred thousand, of ten
hundred thousand, or one million, or of one hundred
million! What might not the slow but ceaseless
creative energy do in that time, changing but a hair
in each generation! If our millionaires had to earn
their wealth cent by cent, and carry each cent home
with them at night, it would be some years before
they became millionaires. This is but a faint symbol
of the slow process by which nature has piled up her
riches. She has had no visions of sudden wealth. To
clothe the earth with soil made from the disinte-
grated mountains — can we figure that time to our-
selves? The Orientals try to get a hint of eternity by
saying that when the Himalayas have been ground
to powder by allowing a gauze veil to float against
them once in a thousand years, eternity will only
have just begun. Our mountains have been pul-
verized by a process almost as slow. In our case the
gauze veil is the air, and the rains, and the snows,
before which even granite crumbles. See what the
god of erosion, in the shape of water, has done in the

8
THE LONG ROAD

river valleys and gorges — cut a mile deep in the
Colorado canyon, and yet this canyon is but of yes-
terday in geologic time. Only give the evolutionary
god time enough and all these miracles are surely
wrought.

Truly it is hard for us to realize what a part time
has played in the earth’s history, — just time, dur-
ation, —so slowly, oh, so slowly, have the great
changes been brought about! The turning of mud
and silt into rock in the bottom of the old seas seems
to have been merely a question of time. Mud does
not become rock in man’s time, nor vegetable mat-
ter become coal. These processes are too slow for us.
The flexing and folding of the rocky strata, miles
deep, under an even pressure, is only a question of
time. Allow time enough and force enough, and a
layer of granite may be bent like a bow. The crys-
tals of the rock seem to adjust themselves to the
strain, and to take up new positions, just as they do,
much more rapidly, in a cake of ice under pressure.
Probably no human agency could flex a stratum of
tock, because there is not time enough, even if there
were power enough. “A low temperature acting
gradually,” says my geology, “ during an indefinite
age would produce results that could not be other-
wise brought about even through greater heat.”
“Give us time,” say the great mechanical forces,
“and we will show you the immobile rocks and your
rigid mountain chains as flexible as a piece of

9
TIME AND CHANGE

leather.” ‘Give us time,”’ say the dews and the
rains and the snowflakes, ‘“‘and we will make you
a garden out of those same stubborn rocks and
frowning ledges.” “Give us time,” says Life, start-
ing with her protozoans in the old Cambrian seas,
“and I will not stop till I have peopled the earth
with myriad forms and crowned them all with
man.”

Dana thinks that had ‘‘a man been living during
the changes that produced the coal, he would not
have suspected their progress,” so slow and quiet
were they. It is probable that parts of our own sea-
coast are sinking and other parts rising as rapidly as
the oscillation of the land and sea went on that re-
sulted in the laying down of the coal measures.

An eternity to man is but a day in the cosmic pro-
cess. In the face of geologic time, man’s appearance
upon the earth as man, with a written history, is
something that has just happened; it was in this
morning’s paper, we read of it at breakfast. As
evolution goes, it will not be old news yet for a hun-
dred thousand years or so, and by that time, what
will he have done, if he goes on at his present rate
of accelerated speed? Probably he will not have
caught the gods of evolution at their work, or wit-
nessed the origin of species by natural descent, these
things are too slow for him; but he will certainly
have found out many things that we are all eager
to know.

10
THE LONG ROAD

In nature as a whole we see results and not pro-
cesses. We see the rock strata bent and folded, we
see the whole mountain-chains flexed and shortened
by the flexure; but had we been present, we should
not have suspected what was going on. Our little
span of life does not give us the parallax necessary.
The rock strata, miles thick, may be being flexed
now under our feet, and we know it not. The earth
is shrinking, but so slowly! When, under the slow
strain, the strata suddenly give way or sink, and an
earthquake results, then we know something has
happened.

Arecent biologist and physicist thinks, and doubt-
less thinks wisely, that the reason why we have
never been able to produce living from non-living
matter in our laboratories, is that we cannot take
time enough. Even if we could bring about the con-
ditions of the early geologic ages in which life had
its dawn, which of course we cannot, we could not
produce life because we have not geologic time at
our disposal.

The reaction which we call life was probably as
much a cosmic or geologic event as were the reactions
which produced the different elements and com-
pounds, and demanded the same slow gestation in
the womb of time. During what cycles upon cycles
the great mother-forces of the universe must have
brooded over the inorganic before the organic was
brought forth! The archean age, during which the

11
TIME AND CHANGE

brooding seems to have gone on, was probably as
long as all the ages since.

How we are baffled when we talk about the begin-
ning of anything in nature or in our own lives! In
our experience there must be a first, but when did
manhood begin; when did puberty, when did old
age, begin? When did each stage of our mental
growth begin? When or where did the English lan-
guage begin, or the French, or the German? Was
there a first English word spoken? From the first
animal sound, if we can conceive of such, up to the
human speech of to-day, there is an infinite grada-
tion of sounds and words.

Was there a first summer, a first winter, a first
spring ? There could hardly have been a first day
even for ages and ages, but only slowly approxi-
mating day. After an immense lapse of time the air
must have cleared and the day become separated
from the night, and the seasons must have become
gradually defined. Things slowly emerge one after
another from a dim, nebulous condition, both in our
own growth and experience and in the development
of the physical universe.

In nature there is no first and last. There is an
endless beginning and an endless ending. There was
no first man or first woman, no first bird, or fish, or
reptile. Back of each one stretches an endless chain
of approximating men and birds and reptiles.

This talk about the time and place where man

12
THE LONG ROAD

began his existence seems to me misleading, be-
cause it appears to convey the idea that he began
as man at some time, in some place. Whereas he
grew. He began where and when the first cell ap-
peared, and he has been on the road ever since.
There is no point in the line where he emerged from
the not-man and became man. He was emerging
from the not-man for millions of years, and when
you put your finger on an animal form and say,
This is man, you must go back through whole geo-
logic periods before you reach the not-man. If Dar-
win is right, there is no more reason for believing
that the different species or forms of animal life were
suddenly introduced than there is for believing that
the soil, or the minerals, gold, silver, diamonds, or
vegetable mold and verdure were suddenly intro-
duced.
II

If we know anything of the earth’s past history,
we know that the continents were long in forming,
that they passed through many vicissitudes of heat
and cold, of fire and flood, of upheaval and sub-
sidence — that they had, so to speak, their first
low, simple rudimentary or invertebrate life, that
they were all slow in getting their backbones, slower
still in clothing their rock ribs with soil and ver-
dure, that they passed through a sort of amphibian
stage, now under water, now on dry land, that
their.many kinds of soils and climes were not differ-

13
TIME AND CHANGE

entiated and their complex water-systems estab-
lished till well into Tertiary times — in short, that
they have passed more and more from the simple
to the complex, from the disorganized to the organ-
ized. When man comes to draw his sustenance
from their breasts, may they not be said to have
reached the mammalian stage ?

The fertile plain and valley and the rounded hill
are of slow growth, immensely slow. But any given
stage of the earth has followed naturally from the
previous stage, only more and more and higher and
higher forces took a hand in the game. First its ele-
ments passed through the stage of fire, then through
the stage of water, then merged into the stage of air.
More and more the aerial elements — oxygen, car-
bon, nitrogen — have entered into its constituents
and fattened the soil. The humanizing of the earth
has been largely a process of oxidation. More than
disintegrated rock makes up the soil; the air and the
rains and the snows have all contributed a share.

The history of the soil which we turn with our
spade, and stamp with our shoes, covers millions
upon millions of years. It is the ashes of the moun-
tains, the leavings of untold generations of animal
and vegetable life. It came out of the sea, it drifted
from the heavens; it flowed out from the fiery heart
of the globe; it has been worked over and over by
frost and flood, blown by winds, shoveled by ice,
—mixed and kneaded and moulded as the house-

14
THE LONG ROAD

wife kneads and moulds her bread, — refining and
refining from age to age. Much of it was held in
solution in the primordial seas, whence it was fil-
tered and used and precipitated by countless forms
of marine life, making a sediment that in time be-
came rocks, that again in time became continents
or parts of them, which the aerial forces reduced to
soil. Indeed, the soil itself is an evolution, as much
so as the life upon it.

We probably have little conception of how inti-
mate and codperative all parts of the universe are
with one another, — of the debt we owe to the far-
thest stars, and to the remotest period of time. We
must owe a debt to the monsters of Mesozoic and
Ceenozoic time; they helped to fertilize the soil for
us, and to discipline the ruder forces of life. We owe a
debt to all that has gone before: to the heavens above
and to the earth-fires beneath, to the ice-sheets that
ground down the mountains, and to the ocean cur-
rents. Just as we owe a debt to the men and women
in our line of descent, so we owe a debt to the ruder
primordial forces that shaped the planet to our use,
and took a hand in the game of animal life.

The gods of evolution had served a long appren-
ticeship; they had gained proficiency and were mas-
ter workmen. Or shall we say that the elements of
life had become more plastic and adaptable, or that
the life fund had accumulated, so to speak? Had
the vast succession of living beings, the long ex-

15
TIME AND CHANGE

perience in organization, at last made the problem
of the origin of man easier to solve?

One fancies every living thing as not only re-
turning its mineral elements to the soil, but as in
some subtle way leaving its vital forces also, and
thus contributing to the impalpable, invisible store-
house of vital energy of the globe.

At first among the mammalian tribes there was
much muscle and little brains. But in the middle
Tertiary the mammal brain began suddenly to en-
large, so that in our time the brain of the horse is
more than eight times the size of the brain of his
progenitor, the dinoceras of Eocene times.

Nature seems to have experimented with brains
and nerve ganglia, as she has with so many other
things. The huge reptilian creatures of Mesozoic
time — the various dinosaurs — had ridiculously
small heads and brains, but they had what might
be called supplementary brains well toward the
other end of the body, — great nervous masses near
the sacrum, many times the size of the ostensible
brain, which no doubt performed certain brain func-
tions. But the principle of centralization was at
work, and when in later time we reach the higher
mammalian forms, we find these outlying nervous
masses called in, so to speak, and concentrated in
the head.

Nature has tried the big, the gigantic, over and
over, and then abandoned it. In Carboniferous

16
THE LONG ROAD

times there was a gigantic dragon-fly, measuring
more than two feet in the expanse of wings. Still
earlier, there were gigantic mollusks and sea scor-
pions, a cephalopod larger than a man; then gigan-
tic fishes and amphibians and reptiles, followed by
enormous mammals. But the geologic record shows
that these huge forms did not continue. The mol-
lusks that last unchanged through millions of years
are the clam.and the oyster of our day. The huge
mosses and tree-ferns are gone, and only their
humbler types remain. Among men giants are
short-lived.

On the other hand, the steady increase in size of
certain other species of animals during the later geo-
logic ages is a curious and interesting fact. The first
progenitors of the elephant that have been found
show a small animal that steadily grew through the
ages till the animal as we now find it is reached.
Among the invertebrates this same progressive in-
crease in size has been noted, a small shell in
the Devonian becoming enormous in the ;Triassic.
Certain species of sharks of medium size in the
lower Eocene continue to increase till they attain
the astounding dimensions in the Miocene and Plio-
cene of over one hundred feet long. A certain fish
appearing in the Devonian as a small fish of seven
centimetres in length, becomes in the Carboniferous
era a creature twenty-seven centimetres in length.
Among the mammals of Tertiary times this same

17
TIME AND CHANGE

law of steady increase in size has been operative,
as seen in the Felide, the stag, and the antelope.
Man himself has, no doubt, been under the same
law, and is probably a much larger animal than any
of his Tertiary ancestors. In the vegetable world
this process, in many cases, at least, has been re-
versed, and the huge treelike club-mosses and horse-
tails of Carboniferous times have dwindled in our
time to very insignificant herbaceous forms.

Animals of overweening size are handicapped in
many ways, so that nature in most cases finally
abandons the gigantic and sticks to the medium
and the small.

1

Can we fail to see the significance of the order in
which life has appeared upon the globe — the as-
cending series from the simple to the more and more
complex? Can we doubt that each series is the out-
come of the one below it — that there is a logical
sequence from the protozoa up through the inver-
tebrates, the vertebrates, to man? Is it not like all
that we know of the method of nature? Could we
substitute the life of one period for that of another
without doing obvious violence to the logic of na-
ture? Is there no fundamental reason for the gra-
dation we behold?

All animal life lowest in organization is earliest in
time, and vice versa, the different classes of a sub-
kingdom, and the different orders of a class, suc-

18
THE LONG ROAD

ceeding one another, as Cope says, in the relative
order of their zodlogical rank. Thus the sponges are
later than the protozoa, the corals succeed the
sponges, the sea-urchins come after the corals, the
shell-fish follow the sea-urchins, the articulates are
later than the shell-fish, the vertebrates are later
than the articulates. Among the former, the am-
phibian follows the fish, the reptile follows the am-
phibian, the mammal follows the reptile, and non-
placental mammals are followed by the placental,

It almost seems as if nature hesitated whether to
produce the mammal from the reptile or from the
amphibian, as the mammal bears marks of both
in its anatomy, and which was the parent stem is
still a question.

The heart started as a simple tube in the Lepto-
cardii ; it divides itself into two cavities in the
fishes, into three in the reptiles, and into four in the
birds and mammals. So the ossification of the ver-
tebral column takes place progressively, from the
Silurian to the middle Jurassic.

The same ascending series of creation as a whole
is repeated in the inception and development of
every one of the higher animals to-day. Each one
begins as a single cell, which soon becomes a con-
geries of cells, which is followed by congeries of con-
geries of cells, till the highly complex structure of the
grown animal with all its intricate physiological
activities and specialization of parts, is reached. It

19
TIME AND CHANGE

is typical of the course of the creative energy from
the first unicellular life up to man, each succeeding
stage flowing out of, and necessitated by, the pre-
ceding stage.

How slowly and surely thé circulatory system
improved! From the cold-blooded animal to the
warm-blooded is a great advance. In the warm-
blooded is developed the capacity to maintain a
fixed temperature while that of the surrounding
medium changes. The brain and nervous system dis-
play the same progressive ascent from the brainless
acrania, up through the fishes, batrachia, reptiles,
and birds to the top in mammals. The same with the
skeletons in the invertebrates, from membrane to
cartilage, from cartilage to bone, so that the primi-
tive cartilage remaining in any part of the skeleton
is considered a mark of inferiority.

According to Cope, there has been progressive
improvement in the mechanism of the body — it
has become a better and better machine. The sus-
pension of the lower jaw, so as to bring the teeth
nearer the power, — the masseter and related mus-
cles, — was a slow evolution and a great advance.
The fin is more primitive than the limb; the limbs
themselves display a constantly increasing differen-
tiation of parts from the batrachian to the mamma-
lian. There was no good ankle joint in early Eocene
times. The model ankle joint is a tongue and groove
arrangement, and this is a later evolution. In Eo-

20
THE LONG ROAD

cene times they were nearly all flat. The arched
foot, too, comes in; this is an advance on the flat
foot. The bones of the palms and soles are not locked
until the later Tertiary. The vertebral column pro-
gressed in the same way, from flat to the double
curve and the interlocking process, thus securing
greatest strength with greatest mobility. In the
earliest life locomotion was diffused, later it be-
came concentrated. The worm walks with its
whole body.
Iv

If we figure to ourselves the geologic history of the
earth under the symbol of a year of three hundred
and sixty-five days, each day a million years, which
is probably not far out of the way, then man, the
biped, the Homo sapiens, in relation to this immense
past, is of to-day, or of this very morning; while the
origin of the first vertebrates, the fishes, from which
he has arisen, falls nearer the middle of the great
year. Or, dividing this geologic year into four di-
visions or seasons, primary, secondary, tertiary, and
quaternary, the fishes fall in the primary, the rep-
tiles in the secondary, the mammals in the ter-
tiary, and man in the early quaternary.

If the fluid earth hardened, and the seas were
formed in the first month of this year, then probably
the first beginning of life appeared in the second
month, the invertebrate in the third or fourth, —
March or April, — the vertebrates in May or June,

21
TIME AND CHANGE

the amphibians in July or August, the reptiles in
August or September, the mammals in October or
November, and man in December, — separated
from the first beginnings of life by all those mil-
lions upon millions of years.

If life is a ferment, as we are told it is, how long
it took this yeast to leaven the whole loaf! Man
is evidently the end of the series, he is the top of
the biological tree. His specialization upon physical
lines seems to have ended far back in geologic time;
his future specialization and development is evi-
dently to be upon mental and spiritual lines. Na-
ture, as I have said, began to tend more and more to
brains in the early. Tertiary, — the autumn of the
great year; her best harvest began to mature then,
her grain began to ripen. Indeed, this increased
cephalization of animal life in the fall of the great
year does suggest a kind of ripening process, the
turning of the sap and milk, which had been so
abundant and so riotous in the earlier period, into
fibre and fruit and seed.

May it not be that that long and sultry spring and
summer of the earth’s early history, a time prob-
ably longer than has since elapsed, played a part
in the development of life analogous to that played
by our spring and summer, making it opulent, varied,
gigantic, and making possible the condensation
and refinement that came with man in the recent
period?

22
THE LONG ROAD

The earth is a pretty big apple, and the solar tree
upon which it hangs is a pretty big tree, but why
may it not have gone through a kind of ripening
process for all that? its elements becoming less crude
and acrid, and better suited to sustain . higher
forms, as the eons passed?

At any rate, the results seem to justify such a fancy.
The earth has slowly undergone a change that may
fairly be called a ripening process; its soil has deep-
ened and mellowed, its harsher features have soft-
ened, more and more color has come to its surface,
the flowers have bloomed, the more succulent fruits
have developed, the air has cleared, and love and
benevolence and altruism have been born in the
world. -

Vv

Life had to creep or swim long before it could
walk, and it walked long before it could fly; it had
feeling long before it had eyes, and it no doubt had
eyes long before it could hear or smell. It was ca-
pable of motion long before it had limbs; it assimi-
lated food long before it had a mouth or a stomach.
It had a digestive tract long before it had a spinal
cord; it had nerve ganglia long before it had a well-
defined brain. It had sensation long before it had
perception; it was unisexual long before it was bi-
sexual; it had a shell long before it had a skeleton;
it had instinct and reflex action long before it had
self-consciousness and reason. Always from the

23
TIME AND CHANGE

lower to the higher, from the simple to the more
complex, and always slowly, gently.

Life has had its foetal stage, its stage of infancy,
and childhood, and maturity, and will doubtless
have its old age. It took it millions upon millions of
years to get out of the sea upon dry land; and it
took it more millions upon dry land, or since the
Carboniferous age, when the air probably first be-
gan to be breathable, — all the vast stretch of the
Secondary and Tertiary ages, —to get upright and
develop a reasoning brain, and reach the estate of
man. Step by step, in orderly succession, does crea-
tion move. In the rising and in‘the setting of the
sun one may see how nature’s great processes steal
upon us, silently and unnoticed, yet always in
sequence, stage succeeding stage, one thing following
from another, the spectacular moment of sunset fol-
lowing inevitably from the quiet, unnoticed sinking
of the sun in the west, or the startling flash of his
rim above the eastern horizon only the fulfillment of
the promise of the dawn. All is development and
succession, and man is but the sunrise of the dawn
of life in Cambrian or Silurian times, and is linked to
that time as one hour of the day is linked to another.

The more complex life became, the more rapidly
it seems to have developed, till it finally makes
rapid strides to reach man. One seems to see Life,
like a traveler on the road, going faster and faster
as it nears its goal. Those long ages of unicellular

24
THE LONG ROAD

life in the old seas, how immense they appear to have
been; then how the age of invertebrates dragged
on, millions upon millions of years; then the age’ of
fishes; the Palzozoic age, how vast — put by
Haeckel at thirty-four millions of years, adding
rock strata forty-one thousand feet thick; then the
Mesozoic or third period, the age of reptiles, eleven
million years, with strata twelve thousand feet thick.
Then came the Cenozoic age, or age of mammals,
three million years, with strata thirty-one hundred
feet thick. The god of life was getting in a hurry
now; man was not far off. A new device, the pla-
centa, was hit upon in this age, and probably the
diaphragm and the brain of animals, all greatly en-
larged. Finally comes the Anthropozoic or Quater-
nary age, the age of man, three hundred thousand
years, with not much addition to the sedimentary
rocks.

Man seems to be the net result of it all, of all these
vast cycles of Palsozoic, Mesozoic, and Cenozoic
life. He is the one drop finally distilled from the
vast weltering.sea of lower organic forms. It looks
as if it all had to be before he could be — all the
delay and waste and struggle and pain — all that
long carnival of sea life, all that saturnalia of gigan-
tic forms upon the land and in the air, all that rising
and sinking of the continents, and all that shovel-
ing to and fro and mixing of the soils, before the
world was ready for him.

25
TIME AND CHANGE

In the early Tertiary, millions of years ago, the
earth seems to have been ripe for man. The fruits
and vegetables and the forest trees were much as we
know them, the animals that have been most serv-
iceable to us were here, spring and summer and
fall and winter came and went, evidently birds sang,
insects hummed, flowers bloomed, fruits and grains
and nuts ripened, and yet man as man was not.

Under the city of London is a vast deposit of
clay in which thousands of specimens of fossil
fruit have been found like our date, cocoanut, areca,
custard-apple, gourd, melon, coffee, bean, pepper,
and cotton plant, but no sign of man. Why was
his development so tardy? What animal profited
by this rich vegetable life? The hope and promise
of the human species at that time probably slept in
some lowly marsupial. Man has gathered up into
himself, as he traveled his devious way, all the best
powers of the animal kingdom he has passed through.
His brain supplies him with all that his body lacks,
and more. His specialization is in this highly de-
veloped organ. It is this that separates him so
widely from all other animals.

Man has no wings, and yet he can soar above the
clouds; he is not swift of foot, and yet he can out-
speed the fleetest hound or horse; he has but feeble
weapons in his organization, and yet he can slay
or master all the great beasts; his eye is not so sharp
as that of the eagle or the vulture, and yet he can see

26
THE LONG ROAD

into the farthest depths of siderial space; he has
only very feeble occult powers of communication
with his fellows, and yet he can talk around the
world and send his voice across mountains and
deserts; his hands are weak things beside a lion’s
paw or an elephant’s trunk, and yet he can move
mountains and stay rivers and set bounds to the
wildest seas. His dog can out-smell him and out-
run him and out-bite him, and yet his dog looks up
to him as to a god. He has erring reason in place of
unerring instinct, and yet he has changed the face of
the planet.

Without the specialization of the lower animals,
— their wonderful adaptation to particular ends, —
their tools, their weapons, their strength, their
speed, man yet makes them all his servants. His
brain is more than a match for all the special ad-
vantages nature has given them. The one gift of
reason makes him supreme in the world.

vI
We have a stake in all the past life of the globe.
It is no doubt a scientific fact that your existence
and mine were involved in the first cell that ap-
peared, that the first zobphyte furthered our for-
tunes, that the first worm gave usa lift. Great good
luck came to us when the first pair of eyes were in-
vented, probably by the trilobite back in Silurian
times; when the first ear appeared, probably in

Qt
TIME AND CHANGE

Carboniferous times; when the first pair of lungs
grew out of a fish’s air-bladder, probably in Triassic
times; when the first four-chambered heart was
developed and double circulation established, prob-
ably with the first warm-blooded animal in Meso-
zoic times.

These humble forms started the brain, the nerv-
ous system, the circulation, sight, hearing, smell;
they invented the liver, the kidneys, the lungs, the
heart, the stomach, and led the way to every organ
and power my body and mind have to-day. They
were the pioneers, they were the dim remote fore-
bears, they conserved and augmented the fund of
life and passed it along.

All their struggles, their discipline, their battles,
their failures, their successes, were for you and me.
Man has had the experience of all the animals be-
low him. He has suffered and struggled as a fish,
he has groveled and devoured as a reptile, he has
fought and triumphed as a quadruped, he has lived
in trees as a monkey, he has inhabited caves with the
wolf and the bear, he has roamed the forests and
plains as a savage, he has survived without fire or
clothes or weapons or tools, he has lived with the
mastodon and all the saurian monsters, he has held
his own against great odds, he has survived the long
battles of the land and the sea, he weathered the
ice-sheet that overrode both hemispheres, he has
seen many forms become extinct. In the historic

28
THE LONG ROAD

period he has survived plague and pestilence, and
want and famine. What must he have survived in
prehistoric times! What must he have had to con-
tend with as a cave-dweller, as a tree-dweller, as
a river-drift man! Before he had tools or weapons
what must he have had to contend with!

Nature was full of sap and rioted in rude strength
well up to Quaternary times, producing extravagant
forms which apparently she had no use for, as she
has discontinued them.

In all these things you and I had our part and lot;
of this prodigal outpouring of life we have reaped
the benefit; amid these bizarre forms and this car-
* nival of lust and power, the manward impulse was
nourished and forwarded. In Eocene times nearly
half the mammals lived on other animals; it must
have been an age of great slaughter. It favored the
development of fleetness and cunning, in which we
too have an interest. Our rude progenitor was surely
there in some form, and escaped the slaughter. Then
or later it is thought he took to the trees to escape
his enemies, as the rats in Jamaica have taken to the
trees to escape the mongoose. To his tree-climbing
we probably owe our hand, with its opposing thumb.

In all his disguises he is still our ancestor. His
story reads like a fairy book. Never did nimble
fancy of childhood invent such transformations —
only the transformations are so infinitely slow, and
attended with such struggle and suffering. Strike

29
TIME AND CHANGE

out the element of time and we have before us a
spectacle more novel and startling than any ho-
cus-pocus or legerdemain that ever set the crowd
agape.

In every form man has passed through, he left
behind some old member or power and took on some
new. He left his air-bladder and his gills and his fins
with the fishes; he got his lungs from the dipno-
ans, the precursors of the amphibians, and from
these last he got his four limbs; he left some part of
his anatomy with the reptile, and took something
in exchange, probably his flexible neck. Somewhere
along his line he picked up the four-chambered
heart, the warm blood, the placenta, the diaphragm,
the plantigrade foot, the mammary glands — indeed,
what has he not picked up on the long road of his
many transformations? He left some of his super-
fluous forty-four teeth with his ancestral quadru-
mana of Eocene times, and kept thirty-two. He
picked up his brain somewhere on the road, prob-
ably far back in Paleozoic times, but how has he
developed and enlarged it, till it is now the one su-
preme thing in the world! His fear, his cunning, his
anger, his treachery, his hoggishness — all his ani-
mal passions — he brought with him from his animal
ancestors; but his moral and spiritual nature, his
altruism, his veneration, his religious emotions,
his esthetic perceptions — have come to him as
a man, supplementing his lower nature, as it were,

30
THE LONG ROAD

with another order of senses — a finer sight, a finer
touch, wrought in him by the discipline of life, and
the wonder of the world about him, beginning de
novo in him only as the wing began de novo in the
bird, or the color began de novo in the flower —
struck out from preéxisting potentialities. The fa-
ther of the eye is the light, and the father of the ear
is the vibration of the air, but the father of man’s
higher nature is a question of quite another sort.
About the only thing in his physical make-up that
man can call his own is his chin. None of the orders
below him seem to have what can strictly be called
a chin.

Man owes his five toes and five fingers to the
early amphibians of the sub-carboniferous times.
The first tangible evidence of these five toes upon
the earth is, to me, very interesting. The earliest
record of them that I have heard of is furnished
by a slab of shale from Pennsylvania, upon which,
while it was yet soft mud, our first five-toed ances-
tor had left the imprint of his four feet. He was evi-
dently a small, short-legged gentleman with a stride
of only about thirteen inches, and he carried a tail
instead of a cane. He was probably taking a stroll
upon the shores of that vast Mediterranean Sea that
occupied all the interior of the continent when he
crossed his mud flat. It was raining that morning —
how many million years ago? — as we know from the
imprint of the raindrops upon the mud. Probably

31
TIME AND CHANGE

the shower did not cause him to quicken his pace,
as amphibians rather like the rain. Just what his
immediate forbears were like, or what the forms
were that connected him with the fishes, we shall
probably never know. Doubtless the great book
of the rocky strata somewhere holds the secret, if
we are ever lucky enough to open it at the right
place. How many other secrets, that evolutionists
would like to know, those torn and crumpled leaves
hold!

It is something to me to know that it rained that
day when our amphibian ancestor ventured out.
The weather was beginning to get organized also,
and settling down to business. It had got beyond
the state of perpetual mist and fog of the earlier
ages, and the raindrops were playing their parts.
Yet, from all the evidence we have, we infer that the
climate was warm and very humid, like that of a
greenhouse, and that vegetation, mostly giant ferns
and rushes and lycopods, was very rank, but there
was no grass, or moss, no deciduous trees, or flowers,
or fruit, as we know these things.

A German anatomist says that we have the ves-
tiges of one hundred and eighty organs which have
stuck to us from our animal ancestors, — now use-
less, or often worse than useless, like the vermiform
appendix. Eleven of these superannuated and ob-
solete organs we bring from the fishes, four from
amphibians and reptiles. The external ear is a ves-

32
THE LONG ROAD

tige — of no use any more. Our dread of snakes we
no doubt inherited from our simian ancestors.

How life refined and humanized as time went on,
sobered down and became more meditative, keep-
ing step, no doubt, with the amelioration of the soil
out of which all life finally comes. Life’s bank ac-
count in the soil was constantly increasing; more
and more of the inorganic was wrought up into the
organic; the value of every clod underfoot was raised.
The riot of gigantic forms ceased, and they became
ashes. The giant and uncouth vegetation ceased,
and left ashes or coal. The beech, the maple, the
oak, the olive, the palm came in. The giant sea-
serpents disappeared; the horse, the ox, the swine,
the dog, the quail, the dove came in. The placental
mammals developed. The horse grew in size and
beauty. When we first come upon his trail, he is a
four-hoof-toed animal no larger than a fox. Later
on we find him the size of a sheep with one of his
toes gone; still later— many hundred thousand
years, no doubt — we find him the size of a donkey,
with still fewer toes, and so on till we reach the
superb creature we know.

The creative energy seems to have worked in
geologic time and in the geologic field just as it
works here and now, in yonder vineyard or in yonder
marsh, — blindly, experimentally, but persistently
and successfully. The winged seeds find their proper
soil, because they search in every direction; the

; 33
TIME AND CHANGE

climbing vines find their support, because in the
same blind way they feel in all directions. Plants
and animals and races of men grope their way to
new fields, to new powers, to new: inventions.

Indeed, how like an inventor Nature has worked,
constantly improving her models, adding to and
changing as experience would seem to dictate! She
has developed her higher and more complex forms
as man has developed his printing-press, or steam-
engine, from rude, simple beginnings. From the
two-chambered heart of the fish she made the treble-
chambered heart of the frog, and then the four-
chambered heart of the mammal. The first mam-
mary gland had no nipples; the milk oozed out and
was licked off by the young. The nipple was a great
improvement, as was the power of suckling in the
young.

Experimenting and experimenting endlessly, tak-
ing a forward step only when compelled by neces-
sity,— this is the way of Nature, —- experimenting
with eyes, with ears, with teeth, with limbs, with
feet, with toes, with wings, with bladders and lungs,
with scales and armors, hitting upon the back-
bone only after long trials with other forms, hitting
upon the movable eye only after long ages of other
eyes, hitting on the mammal only after long ages
of egg-laying vertebrates, hitting on the placenta
only recently,— experimenting all around the circle,
discarding and inventing, taking ages to perfect

34
THE LONG ROAD

the nervous system, ages and ages to develop the
centralized ganglia, the brain. First life was like
a rabble, a mob, without thought or head, then slowly
organization went on, as it were, from family to
clan, from clan to tribe, from tribe to nation, or
centralized government — the brain of man — all
parts duly subordinated and directed, — millions
of cells organized and working on different functions
to one grand end, — codperation, fraternization,
division of labor, altruism, etc.

The cell was the first invention; it is the unit of
life, — a speck of protoplasm with a nucleus. To
educate this cell till it could combine with its fellows
and form the higher animals seems to have been the
aim of the creative energy. First the cell, then com-
binations of cells, then combinations of combina-
tions, then more and more complex combinations
till the body of man is reached, where endless con-
fraternities of cells, all with different functions,
working to build and sustain different organs, —
brain, heart, liver, muscles, nerves, — yet all work-
ing together for one grand end — the body and
mind of man. In their last analysis, all made up of
the same cells — their combinations and organiza-
tion making the different forms.

Evolution touches all forms but tarries with few.
Many are called but few are chosen — chosen to
lead the man-impulse upward. Myriads of forms
are left behind, like driftwood caught in the eddies

35
TIME AND CHANGE

of a current. The clam has always remained a clam,
the oyster remained an oyster. The cockroach is
about the same creature to-day that it was untold
eons ago; so is the shark, and so are many other
forms of marine life. Often where old species have
gone out and new come in, no progress has been
made.

Evolution concentrates along certain lines. The
biological tree behaves like another tree, branches
die and drop off (species become extinct), others
mature and remain, while some central shoot pushes
upward. Many of the huge reptilian and mammalian
branches perished in comparatively late times.

As nothing is more evident than that the same
measure of life or of vital energy — power of growth,
power of resistance, power of reproduction — is not
meted out equally to all the individuals of a species,
or to all species, so it is evident that this power of
progressive development is not meted out equally to
all races of mankind, or to all of the individuals of
the same race. The central impulse of development
seems to have come from the East, in historic times
at least, and to have followed the line of the Medi-
terranean, to have culminated in Europe. And this
progress has certainly been the work of a few minds
— minds exceptionally endowed.

‘ For the most part the barbarian races do not pro-

gress. Their exceptional minds or characters do not

lead the tribes to higher planes of thought. In all
36
THE LONG ROAD

countries we still see these barbarous people which
man in his progress has left behind. Our civiliza-
tion is like a field of light that fades off into shadows
and darkness. There is this margin of undeveloped
humanity on all sides. Always has it been so in
the animal life of the globe; the higher forms have
been pushed up from the lower, and the lower have
remained and continued to multiply unchanged.

It seems as if some central and cherished impulse
had pushed on through each form, and by suc-
cessive steps had climbed from height to height,
gaining a little here and a little there, intensifying
and concentrating as time went on, very vague and
diffuse at first, embryonic so to speak, during the
first half of the great geologic year, but quickening
more and more, differentiating more and more,
delayed and defeated many times, no doubt, yet
never destroyed, leaving form after form unchanged
behind it, till it at last reached its goal in man.

After evolution has done all it can do for us toward
solving the mystery of creation, much remains un-
solved. ;

Through evolution we see creation in travail- -
pains for millions of years to bring forth the varied
forms of life as we know them; but the mystery of
the inception of this life, and of the origin of the
laws that have governed its development, remains.
What lies back of it all? Who or what planted the
germ of the biological tree, and predetermined all

37
TIME AND CHANGE

its branches? What determined one branch to
eventuate in man, another in the dog, the horse,
the bird, or the reptile?

From the finite or human point of view we feel
compelled to say some vaster béing or intelligence
must have had the thought of all these things from
the beginning or before the beginning.

It is quite impossible for me to believe that for-
tuitous variation — variation all around the circle—
could have resulted in the evolution of man. There
must have been a predetermined tendency to varia-
tion in certain directions. To introduce chance into
the world is to introduce chaos. No more would the
waters of the interiors of the continents find their
way to the sea, were there not a slant in that direc-
tion, than could haphazard variation, though checked
and controlled by natural selection, result in the
production of the race of man. This view may be
only the outcome of our inevitable anthropomor-
phism which we cannot escape from, no matter how
deep we dive or high we soar.
Il
THE DIVINE ABYSS

I

N making the journey to the great Southwest, —

Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona, — if one
does not know his geology, he is pretty sure to wish
he did, there is so much geology scattered over all
these Southwestern landscapes, crying aloud to be
read. The book of earthly revelation, as shown by
the great science, lies wide open in that land, as it
does in few other places on the globe. Its leaves
fairly flutter in the wind, and the print is so large
that he who runs on the California Limited may
read it. Not being able to read it at all, or not taking
any interest in it, is like going to Rome or Egypt or
Jerusalem, knowing nothing of the history of those
lands.

Of course, we have just as much geology iin the
East and Middle West, but the books are closed
and sealed, as it were, by the enormous lapse of time
since these portions of the continent became dry
land. The eroding and degrading forces have ages
since passed the meridian of their day’s work, and
grass and verdure hide their footsteps. But in the
great West and Southwest, the gods of erosion and

39
TIME AND CHANGE

degradation seem yet in the heat and burden of the
day’s toil. Their unfinished landscapes meet the eye
on every hand. Many of the mountains look as if
they were blocked out but yesterday, and one sees
vast naked flood-plains, and painted deserts and
bad lands and dry lake-bottoms, that suggest a
world yet in the making.

Some force has scalped the hills, ground the moun-
tains, strangled the rivers, channeled the plains, laid
bare the succession of geologic ages, stripping off
formation after formation like a garment, or cutting
away the strata over hundreds of square miles, as
we pry a slab from a rock — and has done it all but
yesterday. If we break the slab in the prying, and
thus secure only part of it, leaving an abrupt jagged
edge on the part that remains, we have still a better
likeness of the work of these great geologic quarry-
men. But other workmen, invisible to our eyes,
have carved these jagged edges into novel and beau-
tiful forms.

The East is old, old! the West, with the exception
of the Rocky Mountains, is of yesterday in compari-
son. The Hudson was an ancient river before the
Mississippi was born, and the Catskills were being
slowly carved from a vast plateau while the rocks
that were to form many of the Western ranges were’
being laid down as sediment in the bottom of the
sea. California is yet in her teens, while New Eng-
land in comparison is an octogenarian. Just as much

40
THE DIVINE ABYSS

geology in the East as in the West, did I say? Not

‘as much visible geology, not as much by many
chapters of earth -history, not as much by all the
later formations, by most of the Mesozoic and Ter-
tiary deposits. The vast series of sedimentary rocks
since the Carboniferous age, to say nothing of the
volcanic, that make up these periods, are largely
wanting east of the Mississippi, except in New
Jersey and in some of the Gulf States. They are
recent. They are like the history of our own period
compared with that of Egypt and Judea. It is
mainly these later formations— the Permian, the
Jurassic, the Triassic, the Cretaceous, the Eocene,
— that give the prevailing features to the South-
western landscape that so astonish Eastern eyes.
From them come most of the petrified remains of
that great army of extinct reptiles and mammals —
the three-toed horse, the sabre-toothed tiger, the
brontosaurus, the fin-backed lizard, the imperial
mammoth, the various dinosaurs, some of them
gigantic in form and fearful in aspect — that of late
years have appeared in our museums and that throw
so much light upon the history of the animal life of
the globe. Most of the sedimentary rocks of New
York and New England were laid down before these
creatures existed.

Now I am not going to write an essay on the geo-
logy of the West, for I really have little first-hand
knowledge upon that subject, but I would indicate

41
TIME AND CHANGE

the kind of interest in the country I was most con-
scious of during my recent trip to the Pacific Coast
and beyond. Indeed, quite a geologic fever raged in
me most of the time. The rocks attracted me more
than the birds, the sculpturing of the landscapes
engaged my attention more than the improvements
of the farms — what Nature had done more than
what man was doing. The purely scenic aspects of
the country are certainly remarkable, and the
human aspects interesting, but underneath these
things, and striking through them, lies a vast
world of time and change that to me is still more
remarkable, and still more interesting. I could not
look out of the car windows without seeing the
spectre of geologic time stalking across the hills
and plains.

As one leaves the prairie States and nears the great
Southwest, he finds Nature in a new mood — she is
dreaming of cafions; both cliffs and soil have cafion
stamped upon them, so that your eye, if alert, is
slowly prepared for the wonders of rock-carving it
is to see on the Colorado. The cafion form seems
inherent in soil and rock. The channels of the little
streams are cafions, vertical sides of adobe soil, as
deep as they are broad, rectangle grooves in the
ground.

Through all this arid region nature is abrupt, an-
gular, and sudden — the plain squarely abutting the
cliff, the cliff walling the cafion; the dry water-course

42
THE DIVINE ABYSS

sunk in the plain like a carpenter’s groove into a
plank. Cloud and sky look the same as at home,
but the earth is a new earth — new geologically, and
new in the lines of its landscapes. It seems by the
forms she develops that Nature must use tools that
shelong since discarded in the East. She works as if
with the square and the saw and the compass, and
uses implements that cut like chisels and moulding-
planes. Right lines, well-defined angles, and table-
like tops of buttes and mesas alternate with perfect
curves, polished domes, carved needles, and fluted
escarpments.

In the features of our older landscapes there is
little or nothing that suggests architectural forms
or engineering devices; in the Far West one sees
such forms and devices everywhere.

In visiting the Petrified Forests in northern Ari-
zona we stood on the edge of a great rolling plain
and looked down upon a wide, deeply eroded stretch
of country below us that suggested a vast army
encampment, covered as it was with great dome-
shaped, tent-like mounds of a light terra-cotta color,
with open spaces like streets or avenues between
them. There were hundreds or thousands of these
earthy tents stretching away for twenty-five miles.
Along the horizon was a gigantic stockade of red,
rounded pillars, or a solid line of mosque-like temples.
How unreal, how spectral it all seemed! Not a sound
or sign of life in the whole painted solitude — a de-

43
TIME AND CHANGE

serted camp, or one upon which the silence of death
had fallen. Here, in Carboniferous times, grew the
gigantic fern-like trees, the Sigillaria and Lepido-
dendron, whose petrified trunks, for eons buried
beneath the deposit of the Permian seas, and then,
during other zeons, slowly uncovered by the gentle
action of the eroding rains, we saw scattered on the
ground.

You first see Nature beginning to form the cafion
habit in Colorado and making preliminary studies
for her masterpiece, the Grand Cafion. Huge
square towers and truncated cones and needles and
spires break the horizon-lines. Here all her water-
courses, wet or dry, are deep grooves in the soil, with
striking and pretty carvings and modelings adorn-
ing their vertical sides. In the railway cuts you see
the same effects — miniature domes and turrets and
other cafion features carved out by the rains. The
soil is massive and does not crumble like ours and
seek the angle of repose; it gives way in masses like
a brick wall. It is architectural soil, it seeks ap-
proximately the right angle — the level plain or
the vertical wall. It erodes easily under running
water, but it does not slide; sand and clay are in
such proportions as to make a brittle but not a
friable soil.

Before you are out of Colorado, you begin to see
these novel architectural features on the horizon-
line — the cafion turned bottom side up, as it were.

4A
THE DIVINE ABYSS -

In New Mexico, the cafion habit of the erosion
forces is still more pronounced. The mountain-lines
are often as architectural in the distance, or arbi-
trary, as the sky-line of a city. You may see what
you half persuade yourself is a huge brick building
notching the horizon, —an asylum, a seminary, a
hotel, — but it is only a fragment of red sandstone,
carved out by wind and rain.

Presently the high colors of the rocks appear —
high cliffs with terra-cotta fagades, and a new look
in the texture of the rocks, a soft, beaming, less
frowning expression, and colored as if by the Western
sunsets. We are looking upon much younger rocks
geologically than we see at home, and they have the
tints and texture of youth. The landscape and
the mountains look young, because they look un-
finished, like a house half up. The workmen have
but just knocked off work to go to dinner; their
great trenches, their freshly opened quarries, their
huge dumps, their foundations, their cyclopean
masonry, their half-finished structures breaking the.
horizon-lines, their square gashes through the moun-
tains, — all impress the eyes of a traveler from the
eastern part of the continent, where the earth-
building and earth-carving forces finished their
work ages ago.

45
TIME AND CHANGE

Il

Hence it is that when one reaches the Grand
Cafion of the Colorado, if he has kept his eyes and
mind open, he is prepared to see striking and unusual
things. But he cannot be fully prepared for just
what he does see, no matter how many pictures of
it he may have seen, or how many descriptions of it
he may have read.

A friend of mine who took a lively interest in my
Western trip wrote me that he wished he could have
been present with his kodak when we first looked
upon the Grand Cafion. Did he think he could
have got a picture of our souls? His camera would
have shown him only our silent, motionless forms
as we stood transfixed by that first view of the stu-
pendous spectacle. Words do not come readily to
one’s lips, or gestures to one’s body, in the presence
of such a scene. One of my companions said that
the first thing that came into her mind was the old
text, “Be still, and know that I am God.” To be
still on such an occasion is the easiest thing in the
world, and to feel the surge of solemn and reveren-
tial emotions is equally easy; is, indeed, almost in-
evitable. The immensity of the scene, its tranquil-
lity, its order, its strange, new beauty, and the
monumental character of its many forms — all these
tend to beget in the beholder an attitude of silent
wonder and solemn admiration. I wished at the

46
THE DIVINE ABYSS

moment that we might have been alone with the
glorious spectacle, — that we had hit upon an hour
when the public had gone to dinner. The smoking
and joking tourists sauntering along in apparent
indifference, or sitting with their backs to the great
geologic drama, annoyed me. I pity the person who
can gaze upon the spectacle unmoved. Some are
actually terrified by it. I was told of a strong man,
an eminent lawyer from a Western city, who literally
fell to the earth at the first view, and could not
again be induced to look upon it. I saw a woman
prone upon the ground near the brink at Hopi Point,
weeping silently and long; but from what she after-
ward told me I know it was not from terror or sor-
row, but from the overpowering gladness of the in-
effable beauty and harmony of the scene. It moved
her like the grandest music. Her inebriate soul
could find relief only in tears.

Harriet Monroe was so wrought up by the first -
view that she says she had to fight against the de-
sperate temptation to fling herself down into the soft
abyss, and thus redeem the affront which the very
beating of her heart had offered to the inviolable
solitude. Charles Dudley Warner said of it, “I ex-
perienced for a moment an indescribable terror of
nature, a confusion of mind, a fear to be alone in
such a presence.”

It is beautiful, oh, how beautiful! but it is a
beauty that awakens a feeling of solemnity and awe.

AT
TIME AND CHANGE

We call it the “Divine Abyss.” It seems as much
of heaven as of earth. Of the many descriptions of
it, none seems adequate. To rave over it, or to pour
into it a torrent of superlatives, is of little avail. My
companion came nearer the mark when she quietly
repeated from Revelation, “And he carried me away .
in the spirit to a great and high mountain, and
shewed me that great city, the holy Jerusalem.” It
does, indeed, suggest a far-off, half-sacred antiquity,
some greater Jerusalem, Egypt, Babylon, or India.
We speak of it as a scene: it is more like a vision,
so foreign is it to all other terrestrial spectacles,
and so surpassingly beautiful.

To ordinary folk the sight’is so extraordinary,
so unlike everything one’s experience has yielded,
and so unlike the results of the usual haphazard
working of the blind forces of nature, that I did not
wonder when people whom I met on the rim asked
me what I supposed did all this. I could even sym-
pathize with the remark of an old woman visitor
who is reported to have said that she thought they
had built the cafion too near the hotel. The enorm-
ous cleavage which the cafion shows, the abrupt
drop from the brink of thousands of feet, the sheer
faces of perpendicular walls of dizzy height, give at
first the impression that it is all the work of some
titanic quarryman, who must have removed cubic
miles of strata as we remove cubic yards of earth.

Go out to Hopi Point or O’Neil’s Point, and, as

48
THE DIVINE ABYSS

you emerge from the woods, you get a glimpse of a
blue or rose-purple gulf opening before you. The
solid ground ceases suddenly, and an aerial perspec-
tive, vast and alluring, takes its place; another hea-
ven, countersunk in the earth, transfixes you on the
brink. “Great God!” I can fancy the first beholder
of it saying, “what is this? Do I behold the trans-
figuration of the earth? Has the solid ground melted
into thin air? Is there a firmament below as well as
above? Has the earth veil at last been torn aside,
and the red heart of the globe been laid bare?”’ If
this first witness was not at once overcome by the
beauty of the earthly revelation before him, or terri-
fied by its strangeness and power, hemust have stood
long, awed, spellbound, speechless with astonish-
ment, and thrilled with delight. He may have seen
vast and glorious prospects from mountain-tops, he
may have looked down upon the.earth and seen it
unroll like a map before him; but he had never be-
fore looked into the earth as through a mighty win-
dow or open door, and beheld depths and gulfs of
space, with their atmospheric veils and illusions and
vast perspectives, such as he had seen from moun-
tain-summits, but with a wealth of color and a
suggestion of architectural and monumental re-
mains, and a strange, almost unearthly beauty, such
as no mountain-view could ever have afforded him.

Three features of the cafion strike one at once: its
unparalleled magnitude, its architectural forms and

49
TIME AND CHANGE

suggestions, and its opulence of color effects — a
chasm nearly a mile deep and from ten to twenty
miles wide, in which Niagara would be only as a
picture upon your walls, in which the Pyramids,
seen from the rim, would appear only like large
tents, in which the largest building upon the earth
would dwindle to insignificant proportions. There
are amphitheatres and mighty aisles eight miles
long and three or four miles wide and three or four
thousand feet deep. There are room-like spaces eight
hundred feet high; there are well-defined alcoves
with openings a mile wide; there are niches six hun-
dred feet high overhung by arched lintels; there are
pinnacles and rude statues from one hundred to two
hundred feet high. Here I am running at once into
allusions to the architectural features and sugges-
tions of the cafion, which must play a prominent
part in all faithful attempts to describe it. There
are huge, truncated towers, vast, horizontal mould-
ings; there is the semblance of balustrades on the
summit of a noble facade. In one of the immense
halls we saw, on an elevated platform, the outlines
of three enormous chairs, fifty feet or more high,
and behind and above them the suggestion of three
more chairs in partial ruin. Indeed, there is such
an opulence of architectural forms in this divine
abyss as one has never before dreamed of see-
ing wrought by the blind forces of nature. These
forces have here foreshadowed all the noblest archi-
50
THE DIVINE ABYSS

tecture of the world. Many of the vast carved and
ornamental masses which diversify the cafion have
been fitly named temples, as Shiva’s Temple, a mile
high, carved out of the red Carboniferous limestone,
and remarkably symmetrical in its outlines. Near
it is the Temple of Isis, the Temple of Osiris, the
Buddha Temple, the Horus Temple, and the Pyra-
mid of Cheops. Farther to the east is the Diva Tem-
ple, the Brahma Temple, the Temple of Zoroaster,
and the Tomb of Odin. Indeed, everywhere are
there suggestions of temples and tombs, pagodas and
pyramids, on a scale that no work of human hands
can rival. “The grandest objects,” says Major Dut-
ton,“ are merged in a congregation of others equally
grand.” With the wealth of form goes a wealth of
color. Never, I venture to say, were reds and browns
and grays and vermilions more appealing to the eye
than they are as they softly glow in this great cafion.
The color-scheme runs from the dark, sombre hue
of the gneiss at the bottom, up through the yellow-
ish brown of the Cambrian layers, and on up through
seven or eight broad bands of varying tints of red
and vermilion, to the broad yellowish-gray at the
top.
III

The north side of the cafion has been much more
deeply and elaborately carved than the south side;
most of the great architectural features are on the
north side — the huge temples and fortresses and

51
TIME AND CHANGE

amphitheatres. The strata dip very gently to the
north and northeast, while the slope of the surface
is to the south and southeast. This has caused the
drainage from the great northern plateaus to flow
into the cafion and thus cut and carve the north
side as we behold it.

The visitor standing upon the south side looks
across the great chasm upon the bewildering maze
of monumental forms, some of them as suggestive
of human workmanship as anything in nature well
can be, — crumbling turrets and foundations, forms
as distinctly square as any work of man’s hands, vast
fortress-like structures with salients and entering
angles and wing walls resisting the siege of time,
huge pyramidal piles rising story on story, three
thousand feet or more above their foundations, each
successive story or superstructure faced by a huge
vertical wall which rises from a sloping talus that
connects it with the story next below. The slopes
or taluses represent the softer rock, the vertical
walls the harder layers. Usually four or five of these
receding stories make up each temple or pyramid.
Some of the larger structures show all the strata
from the cap of light Carboniferous limestone at the
top to the gray Cambrian sandstone at the bottom.
From others, such as the Temple of Isis, all the
upper formations are gone with a pile of disinte-
grated red sandstone, like a mass of brick dust on
the top where the fragment of the old red wall made

52
THE DIVINE ABYSS

its last stand. In those masses, which are still
crowned with the light gray limestone, one sees how
surely the process of disintegration is going on by
the fragments and débris of light gray rock, like the
chips of giant workmen, that strew the deeper-
colored slopes below them. These fragments fade
out as the eye drops down the slopes, as if they had
melted like bits of ice. Indeed, the melting of ice
and the dissolution of a rock do not differ much ex-
cept that one is very rapid and the other infinitely
slow. In time (not man’s time, but the Lord’s
time), all these light masses that cap the huge tem-
ples will be weathered away, yea, and all the vast
red layers beneath them, and the huge structures
will be slowly consumed by time. The Colorado
River will carry their ashes to the sea, and where
they once stood will be seen gray, desert-like pla-
teaus. Their outlines now stand out like skeletons
from which the flesh has been removed — sharp,
angular, obtrusive, but bound together as by liga-
ments of granite. The tooth of time gnaws at them
day and night and has been gnawing for thousands
of centuries, so that in some cases only their stumps
remain. From the Temple of Isis and the Tomb of
Odin the two or three upper stories are gone.

On the next page is the ground plan of the Temple
of Isis, about twenty-five hundred feet high. The
first story is about a thousand feet; the second, three
hundred and fifty feet; the third, one hundred and

53
TIME AND CHANGE

fifty feet; the fourth, five hundred feet; and the
fifth, five hundred feet. The finish at the top shows
as a heavy crumbling wall,
probably one hundred feet
or more high. How the mass
‘ seems to be resisting the
siege of time, throwing out
its salients here and there,
and meeting the onset of the foes like a military
engineer.

The pyramidal form of these rock-masses is ac-
counted for by the fact that they were carved out
from the top downward, and that each successive
story is vastly older than the one immediately be-
neath it. The erosive forces have been working
whole geologic ages longer on the top layer of rock
than on the bottom layer; hence the topmost ones
are entirely gone or else reduced to small dimensions,
But what feature or quality of the rock it is that
lends itself so readily or so inevitably to these archi-
tectural forms — the four square foundations, the
end pilasters and balustrades, and so on — is to
me not so clear. The peculiar rectangular jointings,
the alternation of soft and hard layers, the nearly
horizontal strata, and other things, no doubt, enter
into the problem. Many of these features are found
in our older geology of the East, as in the Catskills
— horizontal strata, hard and soft layers alternat-
ing, but with the vertical jointing less pronounced;

54

 
THE DIVINE ABYSS

hence the Catskills have few cafion-like valleys,
though there are here and there huge gashes through
the mountains that give a cafion effect, and there
are gigantic walls high up on the face of some of the
mountains that suggest one side of a mighty cafion.
In the climate of the Catskills the rock-masses of
the Colorado would crumble much more rapidly
than they do here. The lines of many of these nat~-
ural temples or fortresses are still more lengthened
and attenuated than those of the Temple of Isis,
appearing like mere skeletons of their former selves.
The forms that weather out the formation above
this, the Permian, appear to be more rotund, and
tend more to domes and rounded hills.

One of the most surprising features of the Grand
Cafion is its cleanness—its freedom from débris.
It is a home of the gods, swept and garnished; no
litter or confusion or fragments of fallen and broken
rocky walls anywhere. Those vast sloping taluses
are as clean as a meadow; rarely at the foot of the
huge vertical walls do you see a fragment of fallen
rock. It is as if the processes of erosion and de-
gradation were as gentle as the dews and the snows,
and carved out this mighty abyss grain by grain,
which has probably been the case. That much of
this red sandstone, from the amount of iron it con-
tains, or from some other cause, disintegrates easily
and rapidly, is very obvious. Looking down from
Hopi Point upon a vast ridge called the ‘“‘ Man-of-

55
TIME AND CHANGE

War,” one sees on the top, where once there must
have been a huge wall of rock, a long level area of
red soil that suggests a garden, the more so because
‘it is regularly divided up into sections by straight
lines of huge stone placed as if by the hands of
man.

One’s sense of the depths of the cafion is so great
that it almost makes one dizzy to see the little birds
fly out over it, or plunge down into it. One seems
to fear that they too will get dizzy and fall to the
bottom. We watched a line of tourists on mules
creeping along the trail across the inner plateau,
and the unaided eye had trouble to hold them; they
looked like little red ants. The eye has more dif-
ficulty in estimating sizes and distances beneath
it than when they are above or on a level with it,
because it is so much less familiar with depth than
with height or lateral dimensions.

Another remarkable and unexpected feature of
the cafion is its look of ordered strength. Nearly

all the lines are lines of greatest strength.

The prevailing profile line everywhere

is that shown herewith. The upright

lines represent lines of cyclopean ma-

sonry, and the slant is the talus that

connects them, covered with a short,
sage-colored growth of some kind, and as soft to
the eye as the turf of our fields.

The simple, strong structural lines assert them-

56
THE DIVINE ABYSS

selves everywhere, and give that look of repose
and security characteristic of the scene. The rocky
forces always seem to retreat in good order be-
fore the onslaught of time; there is neither rout
nor confusion; everywhere they present a calm up-
right front to the foe. And the fallen from their
ranks, where are they? A cleaner battlefield between
the forces of nature one rarely sees.

The weaker portions are, of course, constantly
giving way. The elements incessantly lay siege to
these fortresses and take advantage of every flaw
or unguarded point, so that what stands has been
seven times, yea, seventy times seven times tested,
and hence gives the impression of impregnable
strength. The angles and curves, the terraces and
foundations, seem to be the work of some master
engineer, with only here and there a toppling rock.

I was puzzled to explain to myself the reason of a
certain friendly and familiar look which the great
abyss had for me. One sees or feels at a glance that
it was not born of the throes and convulsions of na-
ture — of earthquake shock or volcanic explosion.
It does not suggest the crush of matter and the wreck
of worlds. Clearly it is the work of the more gentle
and beneficent forces. This probably accounts for
the friendly look. Some of the inner slopes and
plateaus seemed like familiar ground to me: I must
have played upon them when a school-boy. Bright
Angel Creek, for some inexplicable reason, recalled

57
TIME AND CHANGE

a favorite trout-stream of my native hills, and the
old Cambrian plateau that edges the inner chasm,
as we looked down upon it from nearly four thou-
sand feet above, looked like the brown meadow
where we played ball in the old school-days, friendly,
tender, familiar, in its slopes and terraces, in its tints
and basking sunshine, but grand and awe-inspiring
in its depths, its huge walls, and its terrific precipices.

The geologists are agreed that the cafion is only
of yesterday in geologic time, — the Middle Ter-
tiary, — and yet behold the duration of that yes-
terday as here revealed, probably a million years or
more! We can no more form any conception of such
time than we can of the size of the sun or of the
distance of the fixed stars.

The forces that did all this vast delving and sculp-
turing —the air, the rains, the frost, the sunshine —
are as active now as they ever were; but their activ-
ity is a kind of slumbering that rarely makes a sign.
Only at long intervals is the silence of any part of
the profound abyss broken by the fall of loosened
rocks or sliding talus. We ourselves saw where a
huge splinter of rock had recently dropped from the
face of the cliff. In time these loosened masses dis-
appear, as if they melted like ice. A city not made
with hands, but as surely not eternal in the earth!
In our humid and severe Eastern climate, frost and
ice and heavyrains working together, all these arch-
itectural forms would have crumbled long ago, and

58
THE DIVINE ABYSS

fertile fields or hill-slopes would have taken their
place. In the older Hawaiian Islands, which prob-
ably, also date from Tertiary times, the rains have
carved enormous cafions and amphitheatres out of
the hard volcanic rock, in some places grinding the
mountains to such a thin edge that a man may liter-
ally sit astride them, each leg pointing into opposite
valleys. In the next geologic age, the temples and
monuments of the Grand Cajfion will have largely
disappeared, and the stupendous spectacle will be
mainly a thing of the past.

It seems to take millions of years to tame a moun-
tain, to curb its rude, savage power, to soften its
outlines, and bring fertility out of the elemental
crudeness and barrenness. But time and the gentle
rains of heaven will do it, as they have done it in the
East, and as they are fast doing it in the West.

An old guide with whom I talked, who had lived
in and about the cafion for twenty-six years, said,
“While we have been sitting here, the cafion has
widened and deepened”; which was, of course,
the literal truth, the mathematical truth, but the
widening and deepening could not have been appre-
hended by human sense.

Our little span of human life is far too narrow for
us to be a witness of any of the great earth changes.
These changes are so slow, — oh, so slow, — and hu-
man history is so brief. So far as we are concerned,
the gods of the earth sit in council behind closed

59
TIME AND CHANGE

doors. All the profound, formative, world-shaping
forces of nature go on in a realm that we can reach
only through our imaginations. They so far tran-
scend our human experiences that it requires an act
of faith to apprehend them. The repose of the hills
and the mountains, how profound! yet they may be
rising or sinking before our very eyes, and we detect
no sign. Only on exceptional occasions, during earth-
quakes or volcanic eruptions, is their dreamless
slumber rudely disturbed.

Geologists tell us that from the great plateau in
which the Grand Cafion is cut, layers of rock many
thousands of feet thick were cut away before the
cafion was begun.

Starting from the high plateau of Utah, and going
south toward the cafion, we descend a grand geo-
logic stairway, every shelf or tread of which consists
of different formations fifty or more miles broad,
from the Eocene, at an altitude of over ten thousand
feet at the start, across the Cretaceous, the Juras-
sic, the Triassic, the Permian, to the Carboniferous,
which is the bottom or landing of the Grand Cafion
plateau at an altitude of about five thousand feet.
Each step terminates more or less abruptly, the first
by a drop of eight hundred feet, ornamented by
rows of square obelisks and pilasters of uniform pat-
tern and dimension, “giving the effect,” says Major
Dutton, “of a gigantic colonnade from which the
entablature has been removed or has fallen in ruins.”

60
THE DIVINE ABYSS

The next step, or platform, the Cretaceous, slopes
down gradually or dies out on the step beneath it;
then comes the Jurassic, which ends in white sand-
stone cliffs several hundred feet high; then the
Triassic, which ends in the famous vermilion cliffs
thousands of feet high, most striking in color and in
form; then the Permian tread, which also ends
in striking cliffs, with their own style of color and
architecture; .and, lastly, the great Carboniferous
platform in which the cafion itself is carved. Now,
all these various strata above the ‘cafion, making
at one time a thickness of over a mile, were worn
away in Pliocene times, before the cutting of the
Grand Cafion began. Had they remained, and been
cut through, we should have had a chasm two miles
deep instead of one mile.

The cutting power of a large, rapid volume of
water, like the Colorado, charged with sand and
gravel, is very great. According to Major Dutton,
in the hydraulic mines of California, the escaping
water has been known to cut a chasm from twelve
to twenty feet deep in hard basaltic rock, in a single
year. This is, of course, exceptional, but there have,
no doubt, been times when the Colorado cut down-
ward very rapidly. The enormous weathering of its
side walls is to me the more wonderful, probably
because the forces that have achieved this task are
silent and invisible, and, so far as our experience
goes, so infinitely slow in their action.

61
TIME AND CHANGE

The river is a tremendous machine for grinding
and sawing and transporting, but the rains and the
frost and the air and the sunbeams smite the rocks
as with weapons of dowh, and one is naturally in-
credulous as to their destructive effects.

Some of the smaller rivers in the plateau region
flow in very deep but very narrow cafions. The
rocks being harder and more homogeneous, the
weathering has been slight.. The meteoric forces
have not taken a hand in the game. Thus the Parun-
uweap Cafion is only twenty to thirty feet wide, but
from six hundred to fifteen hundred feet deep.

I suppose the slow, inappreciable erosion to which
the old guide alluded would have cut the cafion since
Middle Tertiary times. The river, eating downward
at the rate of one sixteenth of an inch a year, would
do it in about one million years. At half that rate it
would do it in double that time. In the earlier part
of its history, when the rainfall was doubtless
greater, and the river fuller, the erosion must have
been much more rapid than it is at present. The
widening of the cafion was doubtless a slower process
than the downward cutting. But, as I have said,
the downward cutting would tend to check itself
from age to age, while the widening process would
go steadily forward. Hence, when we look into
the great abyss, we have only to remember the
enormous length of time that the aerial and sub-
aerial forces have been at work to account for it.

62
THE DIVINE ABYSS

Two forces, or kinds of forces, have worked to-
gether in excavating the cafion: the river, which is
the primary factor, and the meteoric forces, which
may be called the secondary, as they follow in the
wake of the former. The river starts the gash down-
ward, then the aerial forces begin to eat into the
sides. Acting alone, the river would cut a trench its
own width, and were the rocks through which it saws
one homogeneous mass, or of uniform texture and
hardness, the width of the trench would probably
have been very uniform and much less than it is
now. The condition that has contributed to its
great width is the heterogeneity of the different
formations — some hard and some soft. The softer
bands, of course, introduce the element of weakness.
They decay and crumble the more rapidly, and thus
undermine the harder bands overlying them, which,
by reason of their vertical fractures, break off and
fall to the bottom, where they are exposed to the
action of floods and are sooner or later ground up
in the river’s powerful maw. Hence the recession of
the banks of the cafion has gone steadily on with the
downward cutting of the river. Where the rock is
homogeneous, as it is in the inner chasm of the dark
gneiss, the widening process seems to have gone on
much more slowly. Geologists account for the great
width of the main chasm when compared with the
depth, on the theory that the forces that work later-
ally have been more continuously active than has

63
TIME AND CHANGE

the force that cuts downward. There is convincing
evidence that the whole region has been many times
lifted up since the cutting began, so that the river
has had its active and passive stages. As its channel
approached the sea level, its current would be much
less rapid; and the downward cutting would prac-
tically cease, till the section was elevated again. But
all the time the forces working laterally would be at
work without interruption, and would thus gain on
their checked brethren of the river bottom.

There is probably another explanation of what we
see here. Apart from the mechanical weathering of
the rocks as a result of the arid climate, wherein
rapid and often extreme changes of temperature
take place, causing the surface of the rocks to flake
or scale off, there has doubtless been unusual chem-
ical weathering, and this has been largely brought
about by the element of iron that all these rocks
possess. Their many brilliant colors are imparted
to them by the various compounds of iron which
enter into their composition. And iron, though the
symbol of hardness and strength, is an element of
weakness in rocks, as it causes them to oxidize or
disintegrate more rapidly. In the marble cajion,
where apparently the rock contains no iron, the
lateral erosion has been very little, though the river
has cut a trench as deep as it has in other parts of its
course.

How often I thought during those days at the

64
THE DIVINE ABYSS

cafion of the geology of my native hills amid the
Catskills, which show the effects of denudation as
much older than that shown here as this is olderthan
the washout in the road by this morning’s shower!
The old red sandstone in which I hoed corn as a
farm-boy dates back to Middle Paleozoic time, or to
the spring of the great geologic year, while the cafion
is of the late autumn. Could my native hills have
replied to my mute questionings, they would have
said: “We were old, old, and had passed through the
cafion stage long before the Grand Cafion was born.
We have had all that experience, and have forgot-
ten it ages ago. No vestiges of our cafions remain.
They have all been worn down and obliterated by
the strokes of a hand as gentle as that of a passing
cloud. Where they were, are now broad, fertile
valleys, with rounded knolls and gentle slopes, and
the sound of peaceful husbandry. The great ice
sheet rubbed us and ploughed us, but our contours
were gentle and rounded zons before that event.
When the Grand Cafion is as old as we are, all its
superb architectural features will have long since
disappeared, its gigantic walls will have crumbled,
and rolling plains and gentle valleys will have taken
its place.” All of which seems quite probable. With
time enough, the gentle forces of air and water will
surely change the whole aspect of this tremendous
chasm.

On the second day we made the descent into the

65
TIME AND CHANGE

cafion on mule-back. There is always satisfaction
in going to the bottom of things. Then we wanted
to get on more intimate terms with the great
abyss, to wrestle with it, if need be, and to feel its
power, as well as to behold it. It is not best always
to dwell upon the rim of things or to look down upon
them from afar. The summits are good, but the
valleys have their charm, also; even the valley of
humiliation has its lessons. At any rate, four of us
were unanimous in our desire to sound that vast
profound on mule-back, trusting that the return
trip would satisfy our “climbing” aspirations, as
it did.

It is quite worth while to go down into the cafion
on mule-back, if only to fall in love with a mule, and
to learn what a sure-footed, careful, and docile
creature, when he is on his good behavior, a mule
can be. My mule was named “Johnny,” and there
was soon a good understanding between us. I
quickly learned to turn the whole problem of that
perilous descent over to him. He knew how to take
the sharp turns and narrow shelves of that steep
zigzag much better than I did. I do not fancy that
the thought of my safety was “Johnny’s” guiding
star; his solicitude struck nearer home than that.
There was much ice and snow on the upper part of
the trail, and only those slender little legs of “‘John-
ny’s” stood between me and a tumble of two or
three thousand feet. How cautiously he felt his

66
THE DIVINE ABYSS

way with his round little feet, as, with lowered
head, he seemed to be scanning the trail critically!
Only when he swung around the sharp elbows of
the trail did his forefeet come near the edge of the
brink. Only once or twice at such times, as we hung
for a breath above the terrible incline, did I feel a
slight shudder. One of my companions, who had
never before been upon an animal’s back, so fell in
love with her “Sandy” that she longed for a trunk
big enough in which to take him home with her.
It was more than worth while to make the de-
scent to traverse that Cambrian plateau, which
from the rim is seen to flow out from the base of the
enormous cliffs to the brink of the inner chasm, look-
ing like some soft, lavender-colored carpet or rug.
I had never seen the Cambrian rocks, the lowest of
the stratified formations, nor set my foot upon Cam-
brian soil. Hence a new experience was promised
me. Rocky layers probably two or three miles thick
had been worn away from the old Cambrian foun-
dations, and when I looked down upon that gently
undulating plateau, the thought of the eternity of
time which it represented tended quite as much to
make me dizzy as did the drop of nearly four thou-
sand feet. We found it gravelly and desert-like, cov-
ered with cacti, low sagebrush, and other growths.
The dim trail led us to its edge, where we could look
down into the twelve-hundred-foot V-shaped gash
which the river had cut into the dark, crude-looking
67
TIME AND CHANGE

Archeean rock. How distinctly it looked like a new
day in creation where the horizontal, yellowish-gray
beds of the Cambrian were laid down upon the dark,
amorphous, and twisted older granite! How care-
fully the level strata had been fitted to the shapeless
mass beneath it! It all looked lke the work of a
master mason; apparently you could put the point
of your knife where one ended and the other began.
The older rock suggested chaos and turmoil; the
other suggested order and plan, as if the builder had
said, “Now upon this foundation we will build our
house.” It is an interesting fact, the full geologic
significance of which I suppose I do not appreciate,
that the different formations are usually marked off
from one another in just this sharp way, as if each
one was, indeed, the work of a separate day of crea-
tion. Nature appears at long intervals to turn over a
new leaf and start a new chapter in her great book.
The transition from one geologic age to another
appears to be abrupt: new colors, new constituents,
new qualities appear in the rocks with a suddenness
hard to reconcile with Lyell’s doctrine of uniform-
itarianism, just as new species appear in the life of
the globe with an abruptness hard to reconcile with
Darwin’s slow process of natural selection. Is sudden
mutation, after all, the key to all these phenomena?

We ate our lunch on the old Cambrian table,
placed there for us so long ago, and gazed down
upon the turbulent river hiding and reappearing in

68 .
THE DIVINE ABYSS

its labyrinthian channel so far below us. It is worth
while to make the descent in order to look upon the
river which has been the chief quarryman in ex-
cavating the cajion, and to find how inadequate it
looks for the work ascribed to it. Viewed from where
we sat, I judged it to be forty or fifty feet broad, but
I was assured that it was between two and three
hundred feet. Water and sand are ever symbols
of instability and inconstancy, but let them work
together, and they saw through mountains, and
undermine the foundations of the hills.

It is always worth while to sit or kneel at the feet
of grandeur, to look up into the placid faces of the
earth gods and feel their power, and the tourist
who goes down into the cafion certainly has this
privilege. We did not bring back in our hands, or in
our hats, the glory that had lured us from the top,
but we seemed to have been nearer its sources, and
to have brought back a deepened sense of the mag-
nitude of the forms, and of the depth of the chasm
which we had heretofore gazed upon from a distance.
Also we had plucked the flower of safety from the
nettle danger, always an exhilarating enterprise.

In climbing back, my eye, now sharpened by my
geologic reading, dwelt frequently and long upon
the horizon where that cross-bedded Carboniferous
sandstone joins the Carboniferous limestone above
it. How much older the sandstone looked! I could
not avoid the impression that its surface must have

69
TIME AND CHANGE

formed a plane of erosion ages and ages before the
limestone had been laid down upon it.

We had left plenty of ice and snow at the top, but
in the bottom we found the early spring flowers
blooming, and a settler at what is called the In-
dian Gardens was planting his garden. Here I heard
the song of the cafion wren, a new and very pleasing
bird-song to me. I think our dreams were somewhat
disturbed that night by the impressions of the day,
but our day-dreams since that time have at least
been sweeter and more comforting, and I am sure
that the remainder of our lives will be the richer for
our having seen the Grand Cajion.
TI
“THE SPELL OF THE YOSEMITE

: I

OSEMITE won my heart at once, as it seems

to win the hearts of all who visit it. In my
case many things helped to do it, but I am sure a
robin, the first I had seen since leaving home, did
his part. He struck the right note, he brought the
scene home to me, he supplied the link of association.
There he was, running over the grass or perching
on the fence, or singing from a tree-top in the old
familiar way. Where the robin is at home, there at
home am I. But many other things helped to win
wy heart to the Yosemite — the whole character of
the scene, not only its beauty and sublimity, but the
air of peace and protection, and of homelike seclu-
sion that pervades it; the charm of a nook, a retreat,
combined with the power and grandeur of nature
in her sternest moods.

After passing from the hotel at El Portal along
the foaming and roaring Merced River, and amid
the tumbled confusion of enormous granite bould-
ers shaken down from the cliffs above, you cross the
threshold of the great valley as into some vast house
or hall carved out of the mountains, and at once feel

71
TIME AND CHANGE

the spell of the brooding calm and sheltered seclu-
sion that pervades it. You pass suddenly from the
tumultuous, the chaotic, into the ordered, the tran-
quil, the restful, which seems enhanced by the power
and grandeur that encompass them about. You
can hardly be prepared for the hush that suddenly
falls upon the river and for the gentle rural and
sylvan character of much that surrounds you; the
peace of the fields, the seclusion of the woods, the
privacy of sunny glades, the enchantment of falls
and lucid waters, with a touch of human occupancy
here and there — all this, set in that enormous
granite frame, three or four thousand feet high,
ornamented with domes and spires and peaks still
higher,— it is all this that wins your heart and fills
your imagination in the Yosemite.

As you ride or walk along the winding road up the
level valley amid the noble pines and spruces and
oaks, and past the groves and bits of meadow and
the camps of many tents, and the huge mossy gran-
ite boulders here and there reposing in the shade of
the trees, with the full, clear, silent river winding
through the plain near you, you are all the time
aware of those huge vertical walls, their faces scarred
and niched, streaked with color, or glistening with
moisture, and animated with waterfalls, rising up
on either hand, thousands of feet high, not archi-
tectural, or like something builded, but like the sides
and the four corners of the globe itself. What an

72
THE SPELL OF THE YOSEMITE

impression of mass and of power and of grandeur in
repose filters into you as you walk along! El Capi-
tan stands there showing its simple sweeping lines
through the trees as you approach, like one of the
veritable pillars of the firmament. How long we are
nearing it and passing it! It is so colossal that it
seems near while it is yet far off. It is so simple that
the eye takes in its naked grandeur at a glance. It
demands of you a new standard of size which you
cannot at once produce. It is as clean and smooth
as the flank of a horse, and as poised and calm as
a Greek statue. It curves out toward the base as if
planted there to resist the pressure of worlds —
probably the most majestic single granite column
or mountain buttress on the earth. Its summit is
over three thousand feet above you. Across the val-
ley, nearly opposite, rise the Cathedral Rocks to
nearly the same height, while farther along, beyond
El Capitan, the Three Brothers shoulder the sky at
about the same dizzy height. Near the head of the
great valley, North Dome, perfect in outline as if
turned in a lathe, and its brother, the Half Dome
(or shall we say half-brother?) across the valley,
look down upon Mirror Lake from an altitude of
over four thousand feet. These domes suggest enor-
mous granite bubbles if such were possible pushed
up from below and retaining their forms through
the vast geologic ages. Of course they must have
weathered enormously, but as the rock seems to
13
TIME AND CHANGE

peel off in concentric sheets, their forms are pre-
served.

I

One warm, bright Sunday near the end of April,
six of us walked up from the hotel to Vernal and
Nevada Falls, or as near to them as we could get, and
took our fill of the tumult of foaming waters strug-
gling with the wreck of huge granite cliffs: so impas-
sive and immobile the rocks, so impetuous and reck-
less and determined the onset of the waters, till the
falls are reached, when the obstructed river seems
to find the escape and the freedom it was so eagerly
seeking. Better to be completely changed into foam
and spray by one single leap of six hundred feet into
empty space, the river seems to say, than be forever
baffled and tortured and torn on this rack of merci-
less boulders.

We followed the zigzagging trail up the steep side
of the valley, touching melting snow-banks in its
upper courses, passing huge granite rocks also melt-
ing in the slow heat of the geologic ages, pausing to
take in the rugged, shaggy spruces and pines that
sentineled the mountain-sides here and there, or
resting our eyes upon Liberty Cap, which carries
its suggestive form a thousand feet or more above
the Nevada Fall. What beauty, what grandeur
attended us that day! the wild tumult of waters,
the snow-white falls, the motionless avalanches of

74
THE SPELL OF THE YOSEMITE

granite rocks, and the naked granite shaft, Liberty
Cap, dominating all!

And that night, too, when we sat around a big
camp-fire near our tents in the valley, and saw the
full moon come up and look down upon us from
behind Sentinel Rock, and heard the intermittent
booming of Yosemite Falls sifting through the
spruce trees that towered around us, and felt the
tender, brooding spirit of the great valley, itself
touched to lyric intensity by the grandeurs on every
hand, steal in upon us, and possess our souls—surely
that was a night none of us can ever forget. As Yo-
semite can stand the broad, searching light of mid-
day and not be cheapened, so its enchantments can
stand the light of the moon and the stars and not
be rendered too vague and impalpable.

TIl

Going from the Grand Cafion to Yosemite is
going from one sublimity to another of a different
order. The cafion is the more strange, unearthly,
apocryphal, appeals more to the imagination, and
is the more overwhelming in its size, its wealth of
color, and its multitude of suggestive forms. But for’
quiet majesty and beauty, with a touch of the sylvan
and pastoral, too, Yosemite stands alone. One could
live with Yosemite, camp in it, tramp in it, winter
and summer in it, and find nature in her tender and
human, almost domestic moods, as well as in her

15
TIME AND CHANGE

grand and austere. But I do not think one could
ever feel at home in or near the Grand Cafion; it is
too unlike anything we have ever known upon the
earth; it is like a vision of some strange colossal
city uncovered from the depth of geologic time. You
may have come to it, as we did, from the Petrified
Forests, where you saw the silicified trunks of thou-
sands of gigantic trees or tree ferns, that grew mil-
lions of years ago, most of them uncovered, but
many of them protruding from banks of clay and
gravel, and in their interiors rich in all the colors of
the rainbow, and you wonder if you may not now
be gazing upon some petrified antediluvian city of
temples and holy places exhumed by mysterious
hands and opened up to the vulgar gaze of to-day.
You look into it from above and from another world
and you descend into it at your peril. Yosemite you
enter as into a gigantic hall and make your own; the
cafion you gaze down upon, and are an alien, whether
you enter it or not. Yosemite is carved out of the
most majestic and enduring of all rocks, granite; the
Grand Cafion is carved out of one of the most beau-
tiful, but perishable, red Carboniferous sandstone
and limestone. There is a maze of beautiful and in-
tricate lines in the latter, a wilderness of temple-like
forms and monumental remains, and noble archi-
tectural profiles that delight while they bewilder the
eye. Yosemite has much greater simplicity, and is
much nearer the classic standard of beauty. Its
76
THE SPELL OF THE YOSEMITE

grand and austere features predominate, of course,
but underneath these and adorning them are many
touches of the idyllic and the picturesque. Its many
waterfalls fluttering like white lace against its verti-
cal granite walls, its smooth, level floor, its noble
pines and oaks, its open glades, its sheltering groves,
its bright, clear, winding river, its soft voice of many
waters, its flowers, its birds, its grass, its verdure,
even its orchards of blooming apple trees, all in-
closed in this tremendous granite frame —what an
unforgettable picture it all makes, what a blending
of the sublime and the homelike and familiar it all
is! It is the waterfalls that make the granite alive,
and bursting into bloom as it were. What a touch
they give! how they enliven the scene! What music
they evoke from these harps of stone!

The first leap of Yosemite Falls is sixteen hun-
dred feet — sixteen hundred feet of a compact mass
of snowy rockets shooting downward and bursting
into spray around which rainbows flit and hover.
The next leap is four hundred feet, and the last
six hundred. We tried to get near the foot and in-
spect the hidden recess in which this airy spirit
again took on a more tangible form of still, run-
ning water, but the spray over a large area fell like a
summer shower, drenching the trees and the rocks,
and holding the inquisitive tourist off at a safe
distance. We had to beat a retreat with dripping
garments before we had got within fifty yards of the

V7
TIME AND CHANGE

foot of the fall. At first I was surprised at the vol-
ume of water that came hurrying out of the hidden
recess of dripping rocks and trees — a swiftly flow-
ing stream, thirty or forty feet wide, and four or
five feet deep. How could that comparatively nar-
row curtain of white spray up there give birth to
such a full robust stream? But I saw that in making
the tremendous leap from the top of the precipice,
the stream was suddenly drawn out, as we stretch
a rubber band in our hands, and that the solid and
massive current below was like the rubber again re-
laxed. The strain was over, and the united waters
deepened and slowed up over their rocky bed.

Yosemite for a home or a camp, the Grand Cafion
for a spectacle. I have spoken of the robin I saw
in Yosemite Valley. Think how forlorn and out of
place a robin would seem in the Grand Cajion!
What would he do there? There is no turf for him
to inspect, and there are no trees for him to perch
on. I should as soon expect to find him amid the
pyramids of Egypt, or amid the ruins of Karnak.
The bluebird was in the Yosemite also, and the
water-ouzel haunted the lucid waters.

I noticed a peculiarity of the oak in Yosemite that
I never saw elsewhere! — a fluid or outflowing condi-
tion of the growth aboveground, such as one usually
sees in the roots of trees — so that it tended to en-

1 T have since observed the same trait in the oaks in Georgia
-—probably a characteristic of this tree in southern latitudes.

78
THE SPELL OF THE YOSEMITE

velop and swallow, as it were, any solid object with
which it came in contact. If its trunk touched a
point of rock, it would put out great oaken lips
several inches in extent as if to draw the rock into
its maw. If a dry limb was cut or broken off, a foot
from the trunk, these thin oaken lips would slowly
creep out and envelop it — a sort of Western omni-
vorous trait appearing in the trees.

Whitman refers to “the slumbering and liquid
trees.” These Yosemite oaks recall his expression
more surely than any of our Eastern trees.

The reader may create for himself a good image
of Yosemite by thinking of a section of seven or
eight miles of the Hudson River, midway of its
course, as emptied of its water and deepened three
thousand feet or more, having the sides nearly ver-
tical, with snow-white waterfalls fluttering against
them here and there, the famous spires and domes
planted along the rim, and the landscape of groves
and glades, with its still, clear winding river, occupy-
ing the bottom.

IV

One cannot look upon Yosemite or walk beneath
its towering walls without the question arising in
his mind, How did all this happen? What were the
agents that brought it about? There has beena great
geologic drama enacted here; who or what were the
star actors? There are two other valleys in this part
of the Sierra, Hetch-Hetchy and King’s River, that

79
TIME AND CHANGE

are almost identical in their main features, though
the Merced Yosemite is the widest of the three.
Each of them is a tremendous chasm in the granite
rock, with nearly vertical walls, domes, El Capitans,
and Sentinel and Cathedral Rocks, and waterfalls
— all modeled on the same general plan. I believe
there is nothing just like this trio of Yosemites any-
where else on the globe.

Guided by one’s ordinary sense or judgment alone,
one’s judgment as developed and disciplined by the
everyday affairs of life and the everyday course
of nature, one would say on beholding Yosemite
that here is the work of exceptional and extraor-
dinary agents or world-building forces. It is as sur-
prising and exceptional as would be a cathedral in
a village street, or a gigantic sequoia in a grove of
our balsam firs. The approach to it up the Merced
River does not prepare one for any such astonishing
spectacle as awaits one. The rushing, foaming
water amid the tumbled confusion of huge granite
rocks and the open V-shaped valley, are nothing
very remarkable or unusual. Then suddenly you are
on the threshold of this hall of the elder gods. De-
mons and furies might lurk in the valley below, but
here is the abode of the serene, beneficent Olympian
deities. Allis so calm, so hushed, so friendly, yet so
towering, so stupendous, so unspeakably beautiful.
You are in a mansion carved out of the granite
foundations of the earth, with walls two or three

80
THE SPELL OF THE YOSEMITE

thousand feet high, hung here and there with snow-
white waterfalls, and supporting the blue sky on
domes and pinnacles still higher. Oh, the calmness
and majesty of the scene! the evidence of such tre-
mendous activity of some force, some agent, and
now so tranquil, so sheltering, so beneficent!

That there should be two or three Yosemites in
the Sierra not very far apart, all with the main fea-
tures singularly alike, is very significant — as if this
kind of valley was latent in the granite of that region
—some peculiarity of rock structure that lends
itself readily to these formations. The Sierra lies
beyond the southern limit of the great continental
ice-sheet of late Tertiary times, but it nursed and
reared many local glaciers, and to the eroding power
of these its Yosemites are partly due. But water was
at work here long before the ice — eating down into
the granite and laying open the mountain for the
ice to begin its work. Ice may come, and ice may
go, says the river, but I go on forever. Water tends
to make a V-shaped valley, ice a U-shaped one,
though in the Hawaiian Islands, where water erosion
alone has taken place, the prevailing form of the
valleys is that of the U-shaped. Yosemite approxi-
mates to this shape, and ice has certainly played a
part in its formation. But the glacier seems to have
stopped at the outlet of the great valley; it did not
travel beyond the gigantic hall it had helped to ex-
cavate. The valley of the Merced from the mouth

81
TIME AND CHANGE

of Yosemite downward is an open valley strewn
with huge angular granite rocks and shows no signs
of glaciation whatever. The reason of this abrupt-
ness is quite beyond my ken. It is to mea plausible
theory that when the granite that forms the Sierra
was lifted or squeezed up by the shrinking of
the earth, large fissures and crevasses may have
occurred, and that Yosemite and kindred valleys
may be the result of the action of water and ice in
enlarging these original chasms. Little wonder that
the earlier geologists, such as Whitney, were led to
attribute the exceptional character of these valleys
to exceptional and extraordinary agents — to sudden
faulting or dislocation of the earth’s crust. But
geologists are becoming more and more loath to call
in the cataclysmal to explain any feature of the topo-
graphy of the land. Not to the thunder or the light-
ning, to earthquake or volcano, to the forces of
upheaval or dislocation, but to the still, small
voice of the rain and the winds, of the frost and the
snow, — the gentle forces now and here active all
about us, carving the valleys and reducing the
mountains, and changing the courses of rivers, —
to these, as Lyell taught us, we are to look in nine
cases out of ten, yes, in ninety-nine out of a hun-
dred, to account for the configuration of the con-
tinents.

The geologists of our day, while not agreeing as
to the amount of work done respectively by ice and

82
THE SPELL OF THE YOSEMITE

water, yet agree that to the latter the larger propor-
tion of the excavation is to be ascribed. At any rate
between them both they have turned out one of the
most beautiful and stupendous pieces of mountain
carving to be found upon the earth.
IV

THROUGH THE EYES OF THE
GEOLOGIST

OW habitually we go about over the surface
of the earth, delving it or cultivating it or
leveling it, without thinking that it has not always
been as we now find it, that the mountains were not
always mountains, nor the valleys always valleys,
nor the plains always plains, nor the sand always
sand, nor the clay always clay. Our experience goes
but a little way in such matters. Such a thought
takes us from human time to God’s time, from the
horizon of place and years to the horizon of geologic
ages. We go about our little affairs in the world,
sowing and reaping and building and journeying,
like children playing through the halls of their an-
cestors, without pausing to ask how these things all
came about. We do not reflect upon the age of our
fields any more than we do upon the size of the globe
under our feet: when we become curious about such
matters and look upon the mountains as either old
or young, or as the subjects of birth, growth, and
decay, then we are unconscious geologists. It is to
our interest in such things that geology appeals and
it is this interest that it stimulates and guides.
85
TIME AND CHANGE

What an astonishing revelation, for instance, that
the soil was born of the rocks, and is still born of the
rocks; that every particle of it was once locked up
in the primitive granite and was unlocked by the
slow action of the rain and the dews and the snows;
that the rocky ribs of the earth were clothed with
this fertile soil out of which we came and to which’
we return by their own decay; that the pulling-down
of the inorganic meant the building-up of the organic;
that the death of the crystal meant the birth of the
cell, and indirectly of you and me and of all that
lives upon the earth,

Had there been no soil, had the rocks not decayed,
there had been no you and me. Such considerations
have long made me feel a keen interest in geology,
and especially of late years have stimulated my
desire to try to see the earth as the geologist sees it.
I have always had a good opinion of the ground
underfoot, out of which we all come, and to which.
we all return; and' the story the geologists tell us
about it is calculated to enhance greatly that good
opinion.

I think that if I could be persuaded, as my fathers
were, that the world was made in six days, by the
fiat of a supernatural power, I should soon lose my
interest in it. Such an account of it takes it out of
the realm of human interest, because it takes it out
of the realm of natural causation, and places it in the
realm of the arbitrary, and non-natural. But to

86
THROUGH THE GEOLOGIST’S EYES

know that it was not made at all, in the mechanical
sense, but that it grew — that itis an evolution
as much as the life upon the surface, that it has
an almost infinite past, that it has been developing
and ripening for millions upon millions of years, a
veritable apple upon the great sidereal tree, amelio-
rating from cycle to cycle, mellowing, coloring,
sweetening — why, such a revelation adds im-
mensely to our interest in it.

As with nearly everything else, the wonder of the
world grows the more we grasp its history. The
wonder of life grows the more we consider the chaos
of fire and death out of which it came; the wonder of
man grows the more we peer into the abyss of geo-
logic time and of low bestial life out of which he
came.

Not a tree, not a shrub, not a flower, not a green
thing growing, not an insect of an hour, but has a
background of a vast zon of geologic and astro-
nomic time, out of which the forces that shaped it
have emerged, and over which the powers of chaos
and darkness have failed to prevail.

The modern geologist affords us one of the best
illustrations of the uses of the scientific imagina-
tion that we can turn to. The scientific imagination
seems to be about the latest phase of the evolution
of the human mind. This power of interpretation
of concrete facts, this Miltonic flight into time and
space, into the heavens above, and into the bowels

87
TIME AND CHANGE

of the earth beneath, and bodying forth a veritable
history, a warring of the powers of light and dark-
ness, with the triumph of the angels of light and life,
makes Milton’s picture seem hollow and unreal.
The creativeand poetic imagination has undoubtedly
already reached its high-water mark. We shall prob-
ably never see the great imaginative works of the
past surpassed oreven equaled. But in the world of
scientific discovery and interpretation, we see the
imagination working in new fields and under new
conditions, and achieving triumphs that mark a new
epoch in the history of the race. Nature, which
once terrified man and made a coward of him, now
inspires him and fills him with love and enthusiasm.

The geologist is the interpreter of the records of
the rocks. From a bit of strata here, and a bit there,
he re-creates the earth as it was in successive geo-
logic periods, as Cuvier reconstructed his extinct
animals from fragments of their bones; and the same
interpretative power of the imagination is called
into play in both cases, only the paleontologist has
a much narrower field to work in, and the back-
ground of his re-creations must be supplied by the
geologist.

Everything connected with the history of the
earth is on such a vast scale — such a scale of time,
such a scale of power, such a scale of movement —
that in trying to measure it by our human standards
and experience we are like the proverbial child with

88
THROUGH THE GEOLOGIST’S EYES

his cup on the seashore. Looked at from our point
of view, the great geological processes often seem
engaged in world-destruction rather than in world-
building. Those oft-repeated invasions of the con-
tinents by the ocean, which have gone on from
Archean times, and during which vast areas which
had been dry land for ages were engulfed, seem like
world-wide catastrophes. And no doubt they were
such to myriads of plants and animals of those
times. But this is the way the continents grew. All
the forces of the invading waters were engaged in
making more land.

The geologist is bold; he is made so by the facts
and processes with which he deals; his daring affirm-
ations are inspired by a study of the features of the
earth about him; his time is not our time, his hori-
zous are not our horizons; he escapes from our human
experiences and standards into the vast out-of-doors
of the geologic forces and geologic ages. The text
he deciphers is written large, written across the face
of the continent, written in mountain-chains and
ocean depths, and in the piled strata of the globe.
We untrained observers cannot spell out these
texts, because they are written large; our vision is
adjusted to smaller print; we are like the school-boy
who finds on the map the name of a town or a river,
but does not see the name of the state or the con-
tinent printed across it. If the geologist did-not
tell us, how should we ever suspect that probably

89
TIME AND CHANGE

where we now stand two or more miles of strata have
been worn away by the winds and rains; that the soil
of our garden, our farm, represents the ashes of moun-
tains burned up in the slow fires of the geologic ages.

Geology first gives us an adequate conception of
time. The limitations which shut our fathers into
the narrow close of six thousand years are taken
down by this great science and we are turned out
into the open of unnumbered millions of years. Upon
the background of geologic time our chronological
time shows no more than a speck upon the sky.
The whole of human history is but a mere fraction
of a degree of this mighty arc. The Christian era
would make but a few seconds of the vast cycle of
the earth’s history. Geologic time! The words seem
to ring down through the rocky strata of the earth’s
crust; they reverberate under the mountains, and
make them rise and fall like the waves of the sea;
they open up vistas through which we behold the
continents and the oceans changing places, and the
climates of the globe shifting like clouds in the sky;
whole races and tribes of animal forms disappear
and new ones come upon the scene. Such a past!
the imagination can: barely skirt the edge of it.
As the pool in the field is to the sea that wraps the
earth, so is the time of our histories to the cycle of
ages in which the geologist reckons the events
of the earth’s history.

Through the eyes of the geologist one may look

90
‘THROUGH THE GEOLOGIST’S EYES

upon his native hills and see them as they were in-
calculable ages ago, and as they probably will be
incalculable ages ahead; those hills, so unchanging
during his lifetime, and during a thousand lifetimes,
he may see as flitting as the cloud shadows upon the
landscape. Out of the dark abyss of geologic time
there come stalking the ghosts of lost mountains and
lost hills and valleys and plains, or lost rivers and
lakes, yea, of lost continents; we see a procession of
the phantoms of strange and monstrous beasts,
many of them colossal in size and fearful in form,
and among the minor forms of this fearful troop of
spectres we see the ones that carried safely forward,
through the vicissitudes of those ages, the precious
impulse that was to eventuate in the human race.

Only the geologist knows the part played by ero-
sion in shaping the earth’s surface as we see it. He
sees, I repeat, the phantoms of vanished hills and
mountains all about us. He seestheir shadow forms
wherever he looks. He follows out the lines of the
flexed or folded strata where they come to the sur-
face, and thus sketches in the air the elevation that
has disappeared. In some places he finds that the
valleys have become hills and the hills have become
valleys, or that the anticlines and synclines, as he
calls them, have changed places — as a result of the
unequal hardness of the rocks. Over all the older
parts of the country the original features have been
so changed by erosion that, could they be suddenly

91
TIME AND CHANGE

restored, one would be lost on his home farm. The
rocks have melted into soil, as the snow-banks in
spring melt into water. The rocks that remain are
like fragments of snow or ice that have so far with-
stood the weather. Geologists tell us that the great
Appalachian chain has been in the course of the
ages reduced almost to a base level or peneplain,
and then reélevated and its hills and mountains
carved out anew.

We change the surface of the earth a little with
our engineering, drain a marsh, level a hill, sweep
away a forest, or bore a mountain, but what are
these compared with the changes that have gone on
there before our race was heard of? In my native
mountains, the Catskills, all those peaceful pastoral
valleys, with their farms and homesteads, lie two
or three thousand feet below the original surface
of the land. Could the land be restored again to its
first condition in Devonian times, probably the
fields where I hoed corn and potatoes as a boy would
be buried one or two miles beneath the rocks.

The Catskills are residual mountains, or what
Agassiz calls “denudation mountains.” When we
look at them with the eye of the geologist we see the
great plateau of tableland of Devonian times out of |
which they were carved by the slow action of the
sub-aerial forces. They are like the little ridges and
mounds of soil that remain of your garden-patch
after the waters of a cloudburst have swept over it.

92
THROUGH THE GEOLOGIST’S EYES

They are immeasurably old, but they do not look
it, except to the eye of the geologist. There is no-
thing decrepit in their appearance, nothing broken,
or angular, or gaunt, or rawboned. Their long, easy,
flowing lines, their broad, smooth backs, their deep,
wide, gently sloping valleys, all help to give them a
look of repose and serenity, as if the fret and fever
of life were long since passed with them. Compared
with the newer mountains of uplift in the West,
they are like cattle lying down and ruminating in
the field beside alert wild steers with rigid limbs and
tossing horns. They sleep and dream with bowed
heads upon the landscape. Their great flanks and
backs are covered with a deep soil that nourishes a
very even growth of beech, birch, and maple forests.
Though so old, their tranquillity never seems to
have been disturbed; no storm-and-stress period
has left its mark upon them. Their strata all lie
horizontal just as they were laid down in the old
seas, and nothing but the slow gentle passage of the
hand of time shows in their contours. Mountains
of peace and repose, hills and valleys with the flow-
ing lines of youth, coming down to us from the fore-
world of Palzozoic time, yet only rounded and mel-
lowed by the zons they have passed through. Old,
oh, so old, but young with verdure and limpid
streams, and the pastoral spirit of to-day!

To the geologist most mountains are short-lived.
When he finds great sturdy ranges, like the Alps,

93
TIME AND CHANGE

the Andes, the Himalayas, he knows they are young,
— mere boys. When they get old, they will be cut
down, and their pride and glory gone. A few more
of these geologic years and they will be reduced to
a peneplain, — only their stumps left. This seems
to hold truer of mountains that are wrinkles in the
earth’s crust — squeezed up and crumpled strati-
fied rock, such as most of the great mountain-
systems are — than of mountains of erosion like
the Catskills, or of upheaval like the Adirondacks.
The crushed and folded and dislocated strata are
laid open to the weather as the horizontal strata,
and as the upheaved masses of Archean rock are
not. Moreover, strata of unequal hardness are ex-
posed, and this condition favors rapid erosion.

In imagination the geologist is present at the
birth of whole mountain-ranges. He sees them ges-
tating in the womb of their mother, the sea. Where
our great Appalachian range now stands, he sees,
in the great interior sea of Paleozoic time, what he
calls a “geosyncline,” a, vast trough, or cradle, being
slowly filled with sediment brought down by the
rivers from the adjoining shores. These sediments
accumulate to the enormous depth of twenty-five
thousand feet, and harden into rock. Then in the
course of time they are squeezed together and forced
up by the contraction of the earth’s crust, and thus
the Appalachians are born. When Mother Earth
takes a new hitch in her belt, her rocky garment

94
THROUGH THE GEOLOGIST’S EYES

takes on new wrinkles. Just why the earth’s crust
should wrinkle along lines of rock of such enormous
thickness is not alittle puzzling. But we are told it
is because this heavy mass of sediment presses the
sea-bottom down till the rocks are fused’by the in-
ternal heat of the earth and thus a line of weakness
is established. In any case the earth’s forces act
as a whole, and the earth’s crust at the thickest
points is so comparatively thin — probably not
much more than a heavy sheet of cardboard over
a six-inch globe — that these forces seem to go their
own way regardless of such minor differences.

The Alps and the Himalayas, much younger than
our Appalachians, were also begotten and nursed in
the cradle of a vast geosyncline in the Tertiary seas.
We speak of the birth of a mountain-range in terms
of a common human occurrence, or as if it were an
event that might be witnessed, measurable in hu-
man years or days, whereas it is an event measurable
only in geologic periods, and geologic periods are
marked off only on the dial-face of eternity. The
old Hebrew writer gave but a faint image of it when
he said that with the Lord a thousand years are as
one day; it is hardly one hour of the slow beat of
that clock whose hours mark the periods of the
earth’s development.

The whole long period during which the race of
man has been rushing about, tickling and scratch-
ing and gashing the surface of the globe, would make

95
TIME AND CHANGE

but a small fraction of one of the days that make up
the periods with which the geologist deals. And the
span of human life, how it dwindles to a point in the
face of the records of the rocks! Doubtless the birth
of some of the mountain-systems of the globe is still
going on, and we suspect it not; an elevation of one
foot in a century would lift up the Sierra or the
Rocky Mountains in a comparatively short geologic
period.
I

It was the geologist that emboldened Tennyson

to sing, —
“The hills are shadows and they flow
From form to form and nothing stands,
They melt like mists, the solid lands,
Like clouds they shape themselves and go.”

But some hills flow much faster than others. Hills
made up of the latest or newest formations seem to
take to themselves wings the fastest.

The Archean hills and mountains, how slowly
they melt away! In the Adirondacks, in northern
New England, in the Highlands of the Hudson, they
still hold their heads high and have something of the
vigor of their prime.

The most enduring rocks are the oldest; and the
most perishable are, as a rule, the youngest. It takes
time to season and harden the rocks, as it does men.
Then the earlier rocks seem to have had better stuff
in them. They are nearer the paternal granite; and

96
THROUGH THE GEOLOGIST’S EYES

the primordial seas that mothered them were, no
doubt, richer in the various mineral solutions that
knitted and compacted the sedimentary deposits.
The Cretaceous formations melt away almost like
snow. I fancy that the ocean now, compared with
the earlier condition when it must have been so
saturated with mineral elements, is like thrice-
skimmed milk.

The geologist isnot stinted for time. He deals with
big figures. It is refreshing to see him dealing out his
years so liberally. Do you want a million or two to
account for this or that? You shall have it for the
asking. He has an enormous balance in the bank
of Time, and he draws upon it to suit his purpose.
In human history a thousand years is a long time.
Ten thousand years wipe out human history com-
pletely. Ten thousand more, and we are probably
among the rude cave-men or river-drift men. One
hundred thousand, and we are — where? Probably
among the simian ancestors of man. A million years,
and we are probably in Eocene or Miocene times,
among the huge and often grotesque mammals, and
our ancestor, a little creature, probably of the
marsupial kind, is skulking about and hiding from
the great carnivorous beasts that would devour him.

“Little man, least of all,
Among the legs of his guardians tall,
Walked about with puzzled look.
Him by the hand dear Nature took,

97
TIME AND CHANGE

Dearest Nature, strong and kind,
Whispered, ‘ Darling, never mind!
To-morrow they will wear another face,
The founder thou; these are thy race!’”

I fancy Emerson would be surprised and probably
displeased at the use I have made of his lines. I re-
member once hearing him say that his teacher in
such matters as I am here touching upon was Agas-
siz, and not Darwin. Yet did he not write that
audacious line about “the worm striving to be
man”? And Nature certainly took his “little
man” by the hand and led him forward, and on the
morrow the rest of the animal creation “wore an-
other face.”

tr

In my geological studies I have had a good deal
of trouble with the sedimentary rocks, trying to
trace their genealogy and getting them properly
fathered and mothered. I do not think the geologists
fully appreciate what a difficult problem the origin
of these rocks presents to the lay mind. They bulk
so large, while the mass of original crystalline rocks
from which they are supposed to have been derived
is so small in comparison. In the case of our own
continent we have, to begin with, about two million
of square miles of Archean rocks in detached lines
and masses, rising here and there above the prim-
ordial ocean; a large triangular mass in Canada,
and two broken lines of smaller masses running

98
THROUGH THE GEOLOGIST’S EYES

south from it on each side of the continent, inclosing
a vast interior sea between them. To end with, we
have the finished continent of eight million or more
square miles, of an average height of two thousand
feet above the sea, built up or developed from and
around these granite centres very much as the body
is built up and around the bones, and of such pro-
digious weight that some of our later geologists seek
to account for the continental submarine shelf that
surrounds the continent on the theory that the land
has slowly crept out into the sea under the pressure
of its own weight. And all this, — to say nothing
of the vast amount of rock, in some places a mile
or two in thickness, that has been eroded from the
land surfaces of the globe in later geological time, and
now lies buried in the seas and lakes, — we are told,
is the contribution of those detached portions of
Archean rock that first rose above the primordial
seas. It is a greater miracle than that of the loaves
and the fishes. We have vastly more to end with
than we had to begin with. The more the rocks have
been destroyed, the more they have increased; the
more the waters have devoured them, the more they
have multiplied and waxed strong.

Either the geologists have greatly underestimated
the amount of Archean rock above the waters at the
start, or else there are factors in the problem that
have not been taken into the account. Lyell seems
to have appreciated the difficulties of the problem,

99
TIME AND CHANGE

and, to account for the forty thousand feet of sedi-
ment deposited in Paleozoic times in the region
of the Appalachians, he presupposes a neighboring
continent to the east, probably formed of Lauren-
tian rocks, where now rolls the Atlantic. But if
such a continent once existed, would not some ves-
tige of it still remain? The fact that no trace of it
has been found, it seems to me, invalidates Lyell’s
theory.

Archean time in geologic history answers to pre-
historic time in human history; all is dark and uncer-
tain, though we are probably safe in assuming that
there was more strife and turmoil among the earth-
building forces than there has ever been since. The
body of unstratified rock within the limits of North
America may have been much greater than is sup-
posed, but it seems to me impossible that it could
have been anything like as massive as the continent
now is. If this had been the case there would have
been no great interior sea, and no wide sea-margins
in which the sediments of the stratified rocks could
have been deposited. More than four fifths of the
continent is of secondary origin and shows that vast
geologic eras went to the making of it.

It is equally hard to believe that the priniary or
igneous rocks, where they did appear, were suffi-
ciently elevated to have furnished through erosion
the all but incalculable amount of material that
went to the making of our vast land areas. But

100
THROUGH THE GEOLOGIST’S EYES

the geologists give me the impression that this is
what we are to believe.

Chamberlin and Salisbury, in their recent col-
lege geology, teach that each new formation implies
the destruction of an equivalent amount of older
rock — every system being entirely built up out of
the older one beneath it. Lyell and Dana teach the
same thing. If this were true, could there have been
any continental growth at all? Could a city grow
by the process of pulling down the old buildings for
material to build the new? If the geology is correct,
I fail to see how there would be any more land sur-
face to-day then there was in Archean times. Each
new formation would only have replaced the old
from which it came. The Silurian would only have
made good the waste of the Cambrian, and the De-
vonian made good the waste of the Silurian, and so
on to the top of the series, and in the end we should
still have been at the foot of the stairs. That vast
interior sea that in Archean times stretched from
the rudimentary Appalachian Mountains to the
tudimentary Rocky Mountains, and which is now
the heart of the continent, would still have been a
part of the primordial ocean. But instead of that,
this sea is filled and piled up with sedimentary rocks
thousands of feet thick, that have given birth on
their surfaces to thousands of square miles of as
fertile soil as the earth holds.

That the original crystalline rocks played the

101
TIME AND CHANGE |.

major part in the genealogy of the subsequent strati-
fied rocks, it would be folly to deny. But it seems to
me that chemical and cosmic processes, working
through the air and the water, have contributed
more than they have been credited with.

It looks as if in all cases when the soil is carried
to the sea-bottom as sediment, and again, during
the course of ages, consolidated into rocks, the
rocks thus formed have exceeded in bulk the rocks
that gave them birth. Something analogous to
vital growth takes place. It seems as if the original
granite centres set the world-building forces at
work. They served as nuclei around which the
materials gathered. These rocks bred other rocks,
and these still others, and yet others, till the frame-
work of the land was fairly established. They were
like the pioneer settlers who plant homes here and
there in the wilderness, and then in due time all the
land is peopled.

The granite is the Adam rock, and through a long
line of descent the major part of all the other rocks
directly or indirectly may be traced. Thus the gran-
ite begot the Algonquin, the Algonquin begot the
Cambrian, the Cambrian begot the Silurian, the
Silurian begot the Devonian, and so on up through
the Carboniferous, the Permian, the Mesozoic rocks,
the Tertiary rocks, to the latest Quaternary de-
posit. But the curious thing about it all is the enor-
mous progeny from so small a beginning; the rocks

102
THROUGH THE GEOLOGIST’S EYES

seem really to have grown and multiplied like or-
ganic beings; the seed of the granite seems to have
fertilized the whole world of waters, and in due time
they brought forth this huge family of stratified
rocks. There stands the Archean Adam, his head
and chest in Canada, his two unequal legs running,
one down the Pacific coast, and one down the At-
lantic Coast, and from his loins, we are told, all the
progeny of rocks and soils that make up the conti-
nent have sprung, one generation succeeding an-
other in regular order. His latest offspring is in the
South and Southwest, and in the interior. These
are the new countries, geologically speaking, as well
as humanly speaking.

The great interior sea, epicontinental, the geolo-
gists call it, seems to have been fermenting and
laboring for untold zons in building up these parts
of the continent. In the older Eastern States we find
the sons and grandsons of the old Adam granite; but
in the South and West we find his offspring of the
twentieth or twenty-fifth generation, and so unlike
their forebears; the Permian rocks, for instance, and
the Cretaceous rocks, are soft and unenduring, for
the most part. The later slates, too, are degener-
ates, and much of the sandstones have the hearts of
prodigals. In the Bad Lands of Arizona I could have
cut my way into some of the Eocene formations
with my pocket-knife. Apparently the farther away
we get from the parent granite, the more easily is

103
TIME AND CHANGE

the rock eroded. Nearly all the wonderful and beau-
tiful sculpturing of the rocks in the West and South-
west is in rocks of comparatively recent date.

Can we say that all the organic matter of our
time is from preéxisting organic matter? one or-
ganism torn down to build up another? that the be-
ginning of the series was as great as the end? There
may have been as much matter in a state of vital
organization in Carboniferousor in Cretaceous times
as in our own, but there is certainly more now than
in early Paleozoic times. Yet every grain of this
matter has existed somewhere in some form for all
time. Or we might ask if all the wealth of our day
is from preéxisting wealth — one fortune pulled
down to build up another, — too often the case,
it is true, — thus passing the accumulated wealth
along from one generation to another. On thecon-
trary, has there not been a steady gain of that we
call wealth through the ingenuity and the industry
of man directed towards the latent wealth of the
earth? Ina parallel manner has there been a gain
in the bulk of the secondary rocks through the ac-
tion of the world-building forces directed to the sea,
the air, and the preéxisting rocks. Had there been
no gain, the fact would suggest the ill luck of a man
investing his capital in business and turning it over
and over, and having no more money at the end than
he had in the beginning.

Nothing is in the sedimentary rock that was not

104
THROUGH THE GEOLOGIST’S EYES

at one time in the original granite, or in the primor-
dial seas, or in the primordial atmosphere, or in
the heavens above, or in the interior of the earth
beneath. We must sweep the heavens, strain the
seas, and leach the air, to obtain all this material.
Evidently the growth of these rocks has been mainly
a chemical process — a chemical organization of
preéxisting material, as much so as the growth of
a plant or a tree or an animal. The color and tex-
ture and volume of each formation differ so radically
from those of the one immediately before it as
to suggest something more than a mere mechanical
derivation of one from the other. New factors,
new sources, are implied. ,“‘The farther we recede
from the present time,” says Lyell, “and the higher
the antiquity of the formations which we exam-
ine, the greater are the changes which the sedi-
mentary deposits have undergone.” Above all have
chemical processes produced changes. This con-
stant passage of the mineral elements of the rocks
through the cycle of erosion, sedimentation, and re-
induration has exposed them to the action of the
air, the light, the sea, and has thus undoubtedly
brought about a steady growth in their volume and
a constant change in their color and texture. Marl
and clay and green sand and salt and gypsum and
shale, all have their genesis, all came down to us in
some way or in some degree, from the aboriginal
crystalline rocks; but what transformations and
105

¥
TIME AND CHANGE

transmutations they have undergone! They have
passed through Nature’s laboratory and taken on
new forms and characteristics.

“All sediments deposited in the sea,”’ says my
geology, “undergo more or less chemical change,”
and many chemical changes involve notable changes
in volume of the mineral matter concerned. It has
been estimated that the conversion of granite rock
into soil increases its volume eighty-eight per cent,
largely as the result of hydration, or the taking up of
water in the chemical union. The processes of oxid-
ation and carbonation are also expansive processes.
Whether any of this gain in volume is lost in the pro-
cess of sedimentation and reconsolidation, I do not
know. Probably all the elements that water takes
from the rocks by solution, it returns to them when
the disintegrated parts, in the form of sediment in the
sea, is again converted into strata. It is in this cycle
of rock disintegration and rock re-formation that
the processes of life go on. Without the decay of the
rock there could be no life on the land. Water and
air are always the go-betweens of the organic and
inorganic. After the rains have depleted the rocks
of their soluble parts and carried them to the sea,
they come back and aid vegetable life to unlock and
appropriate other soluble parts, and thus build up
the vegetable and, indirectly, the animal world.

That the growth of the continents owes much to
the denudation of the sea-bottom, brought about by

106
THROUGH THE GEOLOGIST’S EYES

the tides and the ocean-currents, which were prob-
ably much more powerful in early than in late geo-
logic times, and to submarine mineral springs and
volcanic eruptions of ashes and mud, admits of little
doubt. That it owesmuch toextra-terrestrial sources
— to meteorites and meteoric dust — also admits
of little doubt.

It seems reasonable that earlier in the history of
the evolution of our solar system there should have
been much more meteoric matter drifting through
the interplanetary spaces than during the later ages,
and that a large amount of this matter should have
found its way to the earth, in the form either of solids
or of gases. Probably much more material has been
contributed by volcanic eruptions than there is any
evidence of apparent. The amount of mineral mat-
ter held in solution by the primordial] seas must have
been enormous. The amount of rock laid down in
Paleozoic times is estimated at fifty thousand feet,
and of this thirteen thousand feet were limestone;
while the amount laid down in Mesozoic times,
for aught we knowa period quite as long, amounts to
eight thousand feet, indicating, it seems to me, that
the deposition of sediment went on much more rap-
idly in early geologic times. We are nearer the begin-
ning of things. All chemical processes in the earth’s
crust were probably more rapid. Doubtless the rain-
fall was more, but the land areas must have been less.
The greater amount of carbon dioxide in the air dur-

107
TIME AND CHANGE

ing Paleozoic times would have favored more rapid
carbonation. When granite is dissolved by weather-
ing, carbon unites with the potash, the soda, the
lime, the magnesia, and the iron, and turns them
into carbonates and swells their bulk. The one thing
that is passed along from formation to formation un-
changed is the quartz sand. Quartz is tough, and the
sand we find to-day is practically the same that was
dissolved out of the first crystalline rocks.

Take out of the soil and out of the rocks all that
they owe to the air, — the oxygen and the carbon,
—and how would they dwindle! The limestone
rocks would practically disappear.

Probably not less that one fourth of all the sedi-
mentary rocks are limestone, which is of animal
origin. How much of the lime of which these rocks
were built was leached out of the land-areas, and
how much was held in solution by the original sea-
water, is of course a question. But all the carbon
they hold came out of the-air. The waters of the
primordial ocean were probably highly charged with
mineral matter, with various chlorides and sulphates
and carbonates, such as the sulphate of soda, the
sulphate of lime, the sulphate of magnesia, the
chloride of sodium, and the like. The chloride of
sodium, or salt, remains, while most of the other
compounds have been precipitated through the
agency of minute forms of life, and now form parts
of the soil and of the stratified rocks beneath it.

108
THROUGH THE GEOLOGIST’S EYES

If the original granite is the father of the rocks,
the sea is the mother. In her womb they were ges-
tated and formed. Had not this seesaw of land
and ocean taken place, there could have been no con-
tinental growth. Every time the land took a bath
in the sea, it came up enriched and augmented. Each
new layer of rocky strata taken on showed a marked
change in color and texture. It was a kind of evolu-
tion from that which preceded it. Whether the land
always went down, or whether the sea at times came
up, by reason of some disturbance of the ocean floors
in its abysmal depths, we have no means of knowing.
In any case, most of the land has taken a sea bath
many times, not all taking the plunge at the same
time, but different parts going down in successive
geologic ages. The original granite upheavals in
British America, and in New York and New Eng-
land, seem never to have taken this plunge, except
an area about Lake Superior which geologists say
has gone down four or five times. The Lauren-
tian and Adirondack ranges have never been in
pickle in the sea since they first saw the light. In
most other parts of the continent, the seesaw be-
tween the sea and the land has gone on steadily
from the first, and has been the chief means of the
upbuilding of the land.

To the slow and oft-repeated labor-throes of the
sea we owe the continents. But the sea devours her
children. Large areas, probably continental in ex-

109
TIME AND CHANGE

tent, have gone down and have not yet come up, if
they ever will. The great Mississippi Valley was
under water and above water time after time during
the Paleozoic period. The last great invasion of
the land by the sea, and probably the greatest of all,
seems to have been in Cretaceous times, at the end
of the Mesozoic period. There were many minor in-
vasions during Tertiary times, but none on so large
a scale as this Cretaceous invasion. At this time a
large part of North and South America, and of Eu-
rope, and parts of Asia and Australia went under
the ocean. It was as if the earth had exhaled her
breath and let her abdomen fall. The sea united the
Gulf of Mexico with the Arctic Ocean, and covered
the Prairie and the Gulf States and came up over
New Jersey to the foot of the Archean Highlands.
This great marine inundation probably took place
several million years ago. It was this visitation of
the sea that added the vast chalk beds to England
and France. In parts of this country limestone beds
five or six thousand feet thick were laid down, as well
as extensive chalk beds. The earth seems to have
taken another hitch in her girdle during this era.
As the land went down, the mountains came up.
Most of the great Western mountain-chains were
formed during this movement, and the mountains of
Mexico were pushed up. The Alps were still under
the sea, but the Sierra and the Alleghanies were
again lifted.
110
THROUGH THE GEOLOGIST’S EYES

It is very interesting to me to know that in Colo-
tado charred wood, and even charcoal, have been
found in Cretaceous deposits. The fact seems to give
a human touch to that long-gone time. It was, of
course, long ages before the evolution of man, as
man, had taken place, yet such is the power of as-
sociation, that those charred sticks instantly call
him to mind, as if we had come upon the place of his
last campfire. At any rate, it is something to know
that man, when he did come, did not have to dis-
cover or invent fire, but that this element, which has
played such a large part in his development and
civilization, was here before him, waiting, like so
many other things in nature, to be his servant and
friend.. As Vulcan was everywhere rampant during
this age, throwing out enough lava in India alone
to put a lava blanket four or five feet thick over the
whole surface of the globe, it was probably this fire
that charred the wood. It would be interesting to
know if these enormous lava-flows always followed
the subsidence of some part of the earth’s crust. In
Cretaceous times both the subsidence and the lava-
flows seem to have been worldwide.

Iv

We seem to think that the earth has sown all her
wild oats, that her riotous youth is far behind her,
and that she is now passing into a serene old age.
Had we lived during any of the great periods of the

lil
TIME AND CHANGE

past, we might have had the same impression, so
tranquil, for the most part, has been the earth’s his-
tory,’so slow and rhythmical have been the beats
of the great clock of time. We see this in the homo-
geneity of the stratified rocks, layer upon layer for
thousands of feet as uniform in texture and quality
as the goods a modern factory turns out, every yard
of it like every other yard. No hitch or break any-
where. The bedding-planes of many kinds of rock
occur at as regular intervals as if they had been de-
termined by some kind of machinery. Here, on the
formation where I live, there are alternate layers of
slate and sandstone, three or four inches thick, for
thousands of feet in extent; they succeed each other
as regularly as the bricks and mortar in a brick wall,
and are quite as homogeneous. What does this mean
but that for an incalculable period the processes of
erosion and deposition went on as tranquilly as a
summer day? There was no strike among the work-
men, and no change in the plan of the building, or
in the material.

The Silurian limestone, the old red sandstone,
the Hamilton flag, the Oneida conglomerate, where
I have known them, are as homogeneous as a snow-
bank, or as the ice on a mountain lake; grain upon
grain, all from the same source in each case, and
sifted and sorted by thesame agents, and the finished
product as uniform in color and quality as the out-
put of some great mill.

112
THROUGH THE GEOLOGIST’S EYES

Then, after a vast interval, there comes a break:
something like an end and a new beginning, as if one
day of creation were finished and a new one begun.
The different formations lie unconformably upon
each other, which means revolution of some sort.
There has been a strike or a riot in the great mill,
or it has Jain idle for a long period, and when it has
resumed, a different product is the result. Some-
thing happened between each two layers. What?

Though in remote geological ages the earth-
building and earth-shaping forces were undoubtedly
more active than they are now, and periods of de-
formation and upheaval were more frequent, yet
had we lived in any of those periods we should prob-
ably have found the course of nature, certainly when
measured by human generations, as even and tran-
quil as we find it to-day. The great movements are
so slow and gentle, for the most part, that we should
not have been aware of them had we been on the
spot. Once in a million or a half-million years there
may have been terrific earthquakes and volcanic
eruptions, such as seem to have taken place in Ter-
tiary time, and at the end of the Paleozoic period.
Yet the vast stretches of time between were evi-
dently times of tranquillity.

It is probable that the great glacial winter of
Pleistocene times came on as gradually as our own
winter, or through a long period of slowly falling
temperature, and as it seems to have been many

113
TIME AND CHANGE

hundred thousand times as long, this preceding
period, or great fall, was probably equally long
— so long that the whole of recorded human history
would form but a small fraction of it. It may easily
be, I think, that we are now living in the spring of the
great cycle of geologic seasons. The great ice-sheet
has withdrawn into the Far North like snowbanks
that linger in our wood in late spring, where it still
covers Greenland as it once covered this country.
When the season of summer is reached, some hun-
dreds of thousands of years hence, it may be that
tropical life, both animal and vegetable, will again
flourish on the shores of the Arctic Ocean, as it did
in Tertiary times. And all this change will come
about so quietly and so slowly that nobody will
suspect it.

That the crust of the earth is becoming more and
more stable seems a natural conclusion, but that all
folding and shearing and disruption of the strata
are at an end, is a conclusion we cannot reach in the
face of the theory that the earth is shrinking as it
cools.

The earth cools and contracts with almost infinite
slowness, and the great crustal changes that take
place go on, for the most part, so quietly and gently
that we should not suspect them were we present on
the spot, and long generations would not suspect
them. Elevations have taken place across the beds
of rivers without deflecting the course of the river;

114
THROUGH THE GEOLOGIST’S EYES

the process was so slow that the river sawed down
through the rock as fast as it came up. Nearly all
the great cosmic and terrestrial changes and revolu-
tions are veiled from us by this immeasurable lapse
of time.

Any prediction about the permanence of the land
as we know it, or as the race has known it, or of our
immunity from earthquakes or volcanic eruptions,
or of a change of climate, or of any cosmic catas-
trophe, based on human experience, is vain and
worthless. What is or has been in man’s time is
no criterion as to what will be in God’s time. The
periods of great upheaval and deformation in the
earth’s crust appear to be separated by millions of
years. Away back in pre-Cambrian times, there
appear to have been immense periods during which
the peace and repose of the globe were as profound
as in our own time. Then at theend of Palzozoic
time — how many millions of years is only con-
jectural —the truce of zons was broken, and the
dogs of war let loose; it was a period of revolution
which resulted in the making of one of our greatest
mountain-systems, the Appalachian, and in an un-
precedented extinction of species. Later eras have
witnessed similar revolutions. Why may they not
come again? The shrinking of the cooling globe
must still go on, and this shrinking must give rise to
surface disturbances and dislocations, maybe in the
uplift of new mountain-ranges from the sea-bot-

115
TIME AND CHANGE

tom, now undreamed of, and in volcanic eruptions
as great as any in the past. Such a shrinkage and
eruption made the Hawaiian Islands, probably in
Tertiary times; such a shrinkage may make other
islands and other continents before another period
of equal time has elapsed.

Of course the periods and eras into which the
geologists divide geologic time are as arbitrary as
the months and seasons into which we divide our
year, and they fade out into each other in much the
same way; but they are really as marked as our
seasonal divisions. Not in their climates — for the
climate of the globe seems to have been uniformly
warm from pole to pole, without climatic zones,
throughout the vast stretch of Paleozoic and Mes-
ozoic times — but in the succession of animal and
vegetable life which they show. The rocks are the
cemeteries of the different forms of life that have
appeared upon the globe, and here the geologist
reads their succession in time, and assigns them to
his geologic horizons accordingly. The same or allied
forms appeared upon all parts of the earth at ap-
proximately the same time, so that he can trace his
different formations around the world by the fossils
they hold. Each period had its dominant forms.
The Silurian was the great age of trilobites; the
Devonian, the age of fishes; Mesozoic times swarm
with the gigantic reptiles; and in Tertiary times
the mammals are dominant. Each period and era

116

~
THROUGH THE GEOLOGIST’S EYES

has its root in that which preceded it. There were
tude, half-defined fishesin the Silurian, and probably
. the beginning of amphibians in the Devonian, and

some small mammalian forms in the Mesozoic time,
and doubtless rude studies of the genus Homo in
Tertiary times. Nature works up her higher forms ‘
like a human inventor from rude beginnings. Her
first models barely suggest her later achievements.

In the vegetable world it'‘has been the same; from
the first simple algee in the Cambrian seas up to the
forests of our own times, the gradation is easily
traced. Step by step has vegetable life mounted.

The great majority of the plants and animals of
one period fail to pass over into the next, just as our
spring flowers fail to pass over into summer, and
our summer flowers into fall. But the law of evolu-
tion is at work, and life always rises on stepping-
stones of its dead self to higher things.
HOLIDAYS IN HAWAII

N the edge of the world my islands lie,”’ sings
Mrs. Frear in her little lyric on the Hawaiian

Islands.
“On the edge of the world my islands lie,
Under the sun-steeped sky;
And their waving palms
Are bounteous alms
To the soul-spent passer-by.

“On the edge of the world my islands sleep
In a slumber soft and deep.
What should they know
Of a world of woe,
And myriad men that weep ?”

On the rim of the world my fancy seemed to see
them that May day when we went aboard the huge
Pacific steamship in San Francisco Harbor, and she
pointed her prow westward toward the vast wilder-
ness of the Pacific— on the edge of the world,
looking out and down across the vast water toward
Asia and Australia. I wondered if the great iron
ship could find them, and if we should realize or
visualize the geography or the astronomy when we
got there, and see ourselves on the huge rotundity
of the globe not far above her equatorial girdle.

Yes, on the rim of the world they lie to the trav-
eler steaming toward them, and on the rim of the

119
TIME AND CHANGE

world they lie in his memory after his return, bask-
ing there in that tropical sunlight, forever fanned by
those cooling trade winds, and encompassed by that
morning-glory sea. With my mind’s eye I behold

_them rising from that enormous abyss of the Pa-
cific, fire-born and rain-carved, vast voleanic moun-
tains miles deep under the sea, and in some cases
miles high above it, clothed with verdure and teem-
ing with life, the scene of long-gone cosmic strife
and destruction, now the abode of rural and civic
peace and plenty.

The Pacific treated me so much better than the
Atlantic ever had that I am probably inclined to
overestimate everything I saw on the voyage. It
was the first trip at sea that ever gave me any pleas-
ure. The huge vessels are in themselves a great
comfort, and in the placid waters and the sliding
down the rotund side of the great globe under
warmer and warmer skies one gains a very agree-
able experience. The first day’s run must have car-
ried us out and over that huge Pacific abyss, the
Tuscarora Deep, where there were nearly four miles
of water under us. Some of our aeroplanes have
gone up half that distance and disappeared from
sight. I fancy that our ship, more than six hundred
feet long, would have appeared a very small object,
floating across this briny firmament, could one have
looked up at it from the bottom of that sea.

The Hawaiian Islands rise from the border of that

120
HOLIDAYS IN HAWAII

vast deep, and one can fancy how that huge pot must
have boiled back in Tertiary times, when the red-hot
lava of which they are mainly built up was poured
from the interior of the globe.

Softer and more balmy grew the air every day,
more and more placid and richly tinted grew the
sea, till, on the morning of the sixth day, we saw
ahead of us, low on the horizon, the dim outlines
of the mountains of Molokai. The island of Oahu,
upon which Honolulu is situated, was soon in sight.
It was not long before we saw Diamond Head, a vast
crater bowl, eight hundred feet high on its ocean
side, and half a mile across, sitting there upon the
shore like some huge, strange work of man’s hand,
running back through the hills with a level rim, and
seaward with a sloping base, brown and ribbed, and
in every way unique and striking.

We were approaching a land the child of tropic
seas and volcanic lava, and many of the features were
new and strange to us. The mountains looked fa-
miliar in outline, but the colors of the landscape, the
soft lilacs, greens, and browns, and the whole atmo-
sphere of the scene, were unlike anything we had
ever before seen. And Diamond Head, what a fea-
ture it was! Had it only had a head, one could
easily have seen in it a suggestion of a couchant
lion, bony, huge, and tawny, looking seaward, and
guarding the harbor of Honolulu which lies just
behind it. Into this harbor, inthe soft morning air,

121
TIME AND CHANGE

our ship soon found its way, and the monotony of
the vast, unpeopled sea was quickly succeeded by
human scenes of the most varied and animated
character, not the least novel of which were the
swarms of half-amphibious native boys who sur-
rounded the vessel as she lay at the wharf, and
with brown, upturned faces and beckoning hands
tempted the passengers to toss dimes into the
water. As the coins struck the surface they would
dive with the ease and quickness of seals, and seize
the silver apparently before it had gone a yard
toward the bottom. Holding the coins up to view
between the thumb and finger, they would slip
them into their mouths and solicit more.

On shore we were greeted with the music of the
Royal Hawaiian Band, and a motley crowd of
Hawaiians, Japanese, Chinese, Portuguese, and
Americans, bearing colored leis, or wreaths of
flowers, which they waved at friends on board, and
with which they bedecked them as soon as they
came off the gangplank. It was a Babel of tongues
in which the strange, vowel-choked language of the
Hawaiians was conspicuous.

Honolulu is a beautiful city, clean, bright, well
ordered, and well appointed, — electric lights, good
streets, electric cars, fine hotels and clubs, excel-
lent fire protection, mountain water, libraries, parks,
handsome buildings, attractive homes, — in fact, all
that we boast of in our home cities. Embosomed in

122
HOLIDAYS IN HAWAII

palms, with mangoes, and other tropical trees, with
a profusion of gorgeously colored vines and hedges,
with spacious, well-kept grounds about the large
and comfortable houses in the residential portion
— these features, with the ready hospitality of the
people, made our hearts warm towards it at once.

Volcanic heights on all the land side look down
upon the city. Mount Tantalus, rising four thousand
feet above the sea, is just back of it, with its long
slopes of volcanic ash and sand now clothed by for-
ests and fertile fields, and a huge ancient crater
called the Punch Bowl, born probably on the self-
same day, the geologists think, as Diamond Head,
dominates the city in the immediate foreground.
If the Punch Bow! were again to overflow with the
fiery liquid, the city would soon go up in smoke.
But its bowl-like interior is now covered with grass
and trees, and presents a scene of the most peaceful,
rural character.

The Orient and the Occident meet in Honolulu.
There Asia and America join hands. The main
features of the city are decidedly American, but the
people seen upon the street and at work indoors and
out are more than half Oriental. The native popu-
lation cuts only a small figure. The real workers —
carpenters, masons, field hands, and house ser-
vants —- are mostly Japanese. Virtually all the
work of the immense sugar plantations is done by
the little brown men and women, while China sup-

123
TIME AND CHANGE

plies some of the merchants in the city and the sail-
ors and stewards on the ocean steamers. What
admirable servants the Chinese make, so respectful,
so prompt, so silent, so quick to comprehend! The
Japanese house servants on the islands also give
efficient and gracious service.

I had gone to Honolulu reluctantly, but tarried
there joyfully. The fine climate, with its even
temperature of about eighty degrees Fahrenheit,
and with all that is enervating or oppressive in that
degree of heat winnowed out of it by the ceaseless
trade winds; the almost unbroken sunshine, per-
fumed now and then by a sprinkle of sunlit rain
from the mountains; the wonderful sea laving the
shores on the one hand and the cool, cloud-capped,
and rain-drenched heights within easy reach on the
other; the green, cozy valleys; the broad sweep of
plain; the new, strange nature on every side; the
novel and delicious fruits; the pepsin-charged
papaya, or tree melon, which tickles the palate while
it heals and renews the whole digestive system;
the mangoes (oh, the mangoes!); the cordiality of
the people; the inviting bungalows; the clean
streets; the good service everywhere — all made
me feel how mistaken was my reluctance.

Most of the Americans one meets there are de-
scendants of the missionaries who went out from
New England and New York early in the last cen-
tury, and one feels at home with them at once.

124
HOLIDAYS IN HAWAII

Many of the residents there have been educated in
the States. The Governor, Mr; Frear, is a gradu-
ate of Yale; his wife is a graduate of Wellesley. One
day a charming Southern woman, president of the
College Club, invited us to meet the college women
of the city. The gathering took place under the trees
upon the lawn of one of the older homesteads.
There were forty college women present, many of
them teachers, from Vassar, Wellesley, Smith, Bryn
Mawr, and Barnard. Among them were two girls
who had visited me at my cabin, “Slabsides,”
while they were at Vassar.

Wide as is the world, the traveler is pretty sure
to strike threads of relation with his home country
wherever he goes. I made the acquaintance in
Honolulu of a man from my own county; another,
who showed us great kindness, was from an adjoin-
ing county; while one day upon the street I was
called by name by a man whom I had known as a
boy in the town where I now live.

One Saturday a walking-club, largely made up of
men and women teachers, whose native Hawaiian
name meant “Walkers in Unfrequented Places,”
asked us to join them in a walk up Palola Valley to
the site of an extinct crater well up in the moun-
tains. These walkers in unfrequented places proved
to be real walkers, and gave us alland more than we
had bargained for — more mud and wet and slip-
pery trails through clinging vines and rank lantana

125
TIME AND CHANGE

scrub than was good for our shoes and garments or
for the bodies inside them. It was a long pull of
many miles, at first up the valley over a fair high-
way, then into the woods on the mountain-side
along a trail that was muddy and slippery from the
recent showers, and most of the time was buried
out of sight beneath the high, coarse stag-horn fern
and a thick growth of lantana that met above it as
high as our shoulders. A more discouraging moun-
tain climb I never undertook. The vegetation was all
novel, but it had that barbaric rankness of all tropi-
cal woods, with nothing of the sylvan sweetness and
simplicity of our home woods. There were no fine,
towering trees, but low, gnarled, and tortuous ones,
which, with their hanging vines, like the broken
ropes of a ship’s rigging, and their parasitic growths,
presented a riotous, disheveled appearance.
Nature in the tropics, left to herself, is harsh,
aggressive, savage; looks as though she wanted to
hang you with her dangling ropes, or impale you
on her thorns, or engulf you in her ranks of gigantic
ferns. Her mood is never as placid and sane as in
the North. There is a tree in the Hawaiian woods
that suggests a tree gone mad. It is called the
hau-tree. It lies down, squirms, and wriggles all
over the ground like a wounded snake; it gets up,
and then takes to earth again. Now it wants to be
a vine, now it wants to be a tree. It throws somer-
saults, it makes itself into loops and rings, it rolls,
126
HOLIDAYS IN HAWAII

it reaches, it doubles upon itself. Altogether it is
the craziest vegetable growth I ever saw. Where
you can get it up off the ground and let it perform
its antics on a broad skeleton framework, it makes
a cover that no sunbeam can penetrate, and forms
a living roof to the most charming verandas — or
lanais, as they are called in the islands — that one
can wish to see.

But I saw and heard one thing on this walk that
struck a different note: it was one of the native
birds, the Oahu thrush. The moment I heard it I
was reminded of our brown thrasher, though the
song, or whistle, was much finer and richer in tone
than that of our bird. The glimpse I got of the bird
showed it to be of about the size and shape of our
thrasher, but much brighter in color. It seems as
though the two species must have had a common
origin some time, somewhere. I was attracted by
no other native bird on this walk. In the valley be-
low we had seen and heard the Chinese workmen
going about their rice-fields making strange sounds
to drive away the rice-birds, a small, brown species
that has been introduced from India.

When we reached the mountain-top, we found
it enveloped in fog and mist, and the scene was cold
and cheerless. We looked down through a screen of
foliage into a deep valley that seemed almost be-
neath us, and which is supposed to have been an
ancient crater. There, on the brink, the walkers had

127
TIME AND CHANGE

a rude cabin, where we ate our lunch beside a fire
and tried to dry our bedraggled garments.

From this point some of the party continued their
walk, looking for more unfrequented places, but
some of us had longings the other way, and retraced
our steps toward the sunlight and the drier winds
we had left. We reached town footsore and be-
draggled, and the little Japanese who cleaned and
pressed my suit of clothes, and made them look as
good as new for seventy-five cents, well earned his
money.

The walk of eight or ten miles which we took two
weeks later with Governor Frear and his wife, up the
new Castle trail to the mountain-top behind Tan-
talus, had some features in common with the first
walk, — the increasing mist and coolness as we
entered the mountains, the dripping bushes, and the
slippery paths, — but we got finer views, and found
a better-kept trail. Our walk ended on the top of
a narrow ridge of the mountain, where we ate our
lunch in a cold, driving mist and were a bit uncom-
fortable. I was interested in the character of the
ridge upon which we sat. It was not more than six
feet wide, a screen of volcanic rock worn almost to
an edge, and separated two valleys six or seven hun-
dred feet deep. The Governor said he could take me
where the dividing ridge between the two valleys
was so narrow that one could literally sit astride of
it, so that one leg would point to one valley and the

128
HOLIDAYS IN HAWAII

other to the other. This is a feature of a new coun-
try geologically; the rains and other agents of ero-
sion have whittled the mountains to sharp edges,
but have not yet rounded or leveled them.

The northeast trade winds which blow upon these
islands nine months in the year bring a burden of
moisture from the Pacific which is condensed into
rain and mist by the mountains, and which, with
the rank vegetation that it fosters, carves them and
sharpens them like a great grindstone revolving
against their sides. At a place called the Pali —
and at the Needles, on the island of Maui — it has
worn through the mountain-chain and made deep
and very picturesque gorges where, in the case of
the Pali, the wind is so strong and steady that you
can almost lie down upon it.

It was near the Pali that I saw what I had never
seen or heard of before — a waterfall reversed, go-
ing up instead of down. It suggested Stockton’s
story of negative gravity. A small brook comes
down off the mountain and attempts to make the
leap down a high precipice; but the winds catch it
and carry it straight up in the air like smoke. It is
translated; it becomes a mere wraith hovering above
the beetling crag. Night and day this goes on, the
wind snatching from the mountains in this sum-
mary way the water it has brought them.

On the walk with the Governor we made the ac-
quaintance of some of the land shells for which these

‘ 129
TIME AND CHANGE

islands are famous — pretty, pearl-like little whorls
living on the largest trees, and about the size of a
chipping sparrow’s egg, with pointed ends, variously
colored. There are more than two hundred species
on the different islands, I think, each valley having
varieties peculiar to itself, showing what a factor
isolation is in the evolution of new species. The
Governor and his wife, and a young man who had
specialized in conchology, plucked them from nearly
every bush and tree; but my eye, being untrained
in this kind of work, was very slow in finding
them.

Coming down from these Hawaiian mountains
is like coming out of a dripping tent of clouds into
the clear, warm sunshine. The change is most de-
lightful. Your clothing dries very quickly, and chil-
liness gives place to genial warmth. And the pro-
spects that open before you, the glimpses down
into these deep, yellow-green, crater-like valleys,
checkered with neat little Chinese farms, the pano-
rama of the city and the sea unrolling as you come
down, and always Diamond Head standing guard
there to the east — how the vision of it all lingers
in the memory!

In climbing the heights, it was always a surprise
to me to see the Pacific rise up as I rose, till it stood
up like a great blue wall there against the horizon.
A level plain unrolls in the same way as we mount
above it, but it does not produce the same illusion

130
HOLIDAYS IN HAWAII

of rising up like a wall or a mountain-range ; the
blue, facile water cheats the eye.

One of the novel pleasures in which most travelers
indulge while in Honolulu is surf-riding at Waikiki,
near Diamond Head. The sea, with a floor of lava
and coral, is here shallow for a long distance out,
and the surf comes in at intervals like a line of
steeds cantering over a plain. We went out in our
bathing-suits in a long, heavy dugout, with a lusty
native oarsman in each end. When several hundred
yards from shore, we saw, on looking seaward, the
long, shining billows coming, whereupon our oars-
men headed the canoe toward shore, and plied their
paddles with utmost vigor, uttering simultaneously
a curious, excited cry. In a moment the breaker
caught us and, in some way holding us on its crest,
shot us toward the shore like an arrow. The sensa-
tion is novel and thrilling. The foam flies; the
waters leap about you. You are coasting on the sea,
and you shout with delight and pray forthesensation
to continue. But it is quickly over. The hurrying
breaker slips from under you, and leaves you in the
trough, while it goes foaming on the shore. Then
you turn about and row out from the shore again,
and wait for another chance to be shot toward the
land on the foaming crest of a great Pacific wave.

I suppose the trick is in the skill of the oarsmen
in holding the boat on the pitch of the billow so
that in its rush it takes you withit. The native

131
TIME AND CHANGE

boys do the feat standing on a plank. I was tempted
to try this myself, but of course made a comical
failure.

One of my pleasant surprises in Honolulu — one
that gave the touch of nature which made me feel
less a stranger there — was learning that the Euro-
pean skylark had been introduced and was thriving
on the grassy slopes back of the city. The mina, a
species of starling from India as large as our robin
and rather showily dressed, with a loud, strident
voice, I had seen and heard everywhere both in
town and country, but he was a stranger and did
not appeal to me. But the thought of the skylark
brought Shelley and Wordsworth, and English
downs and meadows, near to me at once, and I was
eager to hear it. So early one morning we left the
Pleasanton, our tarrying-place, and climbed the
long, pastoral slope above the city, where cattle and
horses were grazing, and listened for this minstrel
from the motherland. We had not long to wait.
Sure enough, not far from us there sprang from the
turf Shelley’s bird, and went climbing his invisible
spiral toward the sky, pouring out those hurried,
ecstatic notes, just as I had heard him above the
South Downs of England. It was a moment of keen
delight to me. The bird soared and hovered, drift-
ing about, as it were, before the impetuous current
of his song, with all the joy and abandon with which
the poets have credited him. It was like a bit of

132
HOLIDAYS IN HAWAII

English literature vocal in the air there above these
alien scenes. Presently another went up, and then
another, and still another, the singers behaving
in every respect as they do by the Avon and the
Tweed, and for a moment I seemed to be breathing
the air that Wordsworth and Shelley breathed.

If our excursion had taken us only to the island
of Oahu and its beautiful city, it would have been
eminently worth while, but the last week in May we
took what is called the inter-island trip, a six days’
voyage among the various islands, when we visited
the great extinct crater of Haleakala on Maui, and
the active volcano Kilauea on Hawaii. It is a voy-
age over several rough channels in a small steamer,
and my friends said, “If you have not yet paid
tribute to Neptune, you will pay it now.” But I did
not. My companions were prostrated, but I see
Neptune respects age, and my slumbers were undis-
turbed. A wireless message had gone to Mr. Aiken,
on the island of Maui, to meet us with his auto-
mobile in the morning at the landing at Kahului.
We were taken to the shore on a lighter, along with
the horses and cargo, and there found our new
friend awaiting us.

The great mountain of Haleakala rose up in a long
line against the sky on the left, and the deeply
eroded and cafioned mountains of the older, or west,
end of the island on our right. Toward the latter our
guide took us. It was a pleasant spin along the good

133

+
TIME AND CHANGE

roads, in the fresh morning air, near the beach, to
Wailuku, the shire town of the island, two or three
miles distant. Here we were most hospitably enter-
tained in the home of Mr. Penhallow, the director
of a large sugar plantation.

Here for the first time in my life I saw a gang of
steam plows working, pulled by a stationary engine
at each end of the field, and turning over the red,
heavy volcanic soil. The work was mainly in the
hands of Japanese, and was well done. We after-
ward saw Japanese by the score, both men and
women, planting a large area of newly plowed
land with sugar-cane.

After we were rested and refreshed, and had
sampled the mangoes that had fallen from a tree
near the house, Mr. Aiken took us in his automobile
up into the famous Iao Valley, at the mouth of
which Wailuku is situated. It is a deep, striking
chasm carved out of the mountain by the stream,
rank with verdure of various kinds, and looked
down upon by sharp peaks and ridges five or six
thousand feet high. We soon reached the clear
rapid, brawling stream, as bright as a Catskill moun-
tain trout brook, and after a mile or two along its
course we came to the end of the road, where we left
the machine and took atrail that wound onward and
upward over a slippery surface and through dripping
bushes, for we here began to reach the skirts of the
little showers that almost constantly career overand

134
HOLIDAYS IN HAWAII

about the interior of these mountains. I neither saw
nor heard a bird or other live thing. Guava apples
lay on the ground all along the trail, and one could
eat them and not make faces. Some of the sharp,
knife-blade ridges that cut down toward us from the
higher peaks were very startling, and so steep and
high that they could be successfully scaled only by
the aid of ropes and ladders. A more striking object-
lesson in erosion by rain would be hard to find.
There were no naked rocks; short, thick vegetation
covered even the steepest slopes, and the vegetable
acids which this generated, and the perpetual rains,
weathered the mountains down. It soon became so
wet that we stopped far short of the head of the val-
ley, and turned back. I wished to look into the
great, deep, green amphitheatre which seems to lie
at the head, but had glimpses of it only from a dis-
tance. How many millenniums will it be, I said to
myself, before erosion will have completed its work
here, and these thin, high mountain-walls will be
in ruins? Surely not many.

We returned to the hospitable home we had left,
and passed the midday there. In the afternoon Mr,
Aiken, guiding our eyes by the forms of trees that
cut the horizon-line on the huge flank of Haleakala,
pointed out the place of his own homestead, twenty
or more miles away. From this point the great
mountain appeared like a vast landscape tilted up
at an easy angle against the horizon. One could

135
TIME AND CHANGE

hardly believe it was ten thousand feet high. The
machine climbed easily more than half the distance
to Mr. Aiken’s plantation, which we reached in good
time in the afternoon, and where we passed a very
enjoyable night. It was a surprise to find swarms
of mosquitoes at this altitude, so free from all
mosquito-breeding waters. But the house was well
protected against them. Mosquitoes, as well as flies
and vermin, are not native to the island. They
came in ships not very long ago, and are now very
troublesome in certain parts. They came round
the Horn. Mr. Aiken’s house itself came round
the Horn seventy or eighty years ago. It is a
quaint, New England type of house, and has a very
homelike look. In front of it, near the gate, stands
a Japanese pine which is an object of veneration to
all Japanese who chance to come that way. Often
their eyes fill with tears on beholding it, so respon-
sive are the little yellow men to associations of
home.

In the morning Mr. Aiken drove us in a wagon to
a place he has called “Idlewild,” six miles farther
up the great slope of the mountain. This slope of
Haleakala is like a whole township, diversified with
farms and woods, valleys and hills, resting on its
elbows, so to speak, and looking out over the Pacific.
We could look up to the cloud-line, about seven
thousand feet above the sea, and occasionally get a
glimpse of the long line of the summit through rifts

136
HOLIDAYS IN HAWAII

in the clouds. At Idlewild our expedition, consist-
ing of six mules and four people, was fitted out, and
in the early afternoon we started on the trail up the
mountain.

For several miles our way led over grassy slopes
where cattle were grazing, and above which sky-
larks were singing. This was one of the happy sur-
prises of the trip — the soaring and singing sky-
larks. All the way till we reached the cloud-belt,
we had the larks pouring down their music from the
sky above us. They seemed specially jubilant. It
was May in England, too, and they sang as though
the spirit of those downs and fells was stirring in
their hearts, under alien skies, but true to the mem-
ories of home.

Before we reached the summit we came upon an-
other introduction from overseas — the English
pheasant. One started up from some bushes only a
few yards from the trail, went booming away, and
disappeared in a deep gully. A little later another
sprang up, uttering a cackling cry as it flew away.
We saw three altogether. The only home thing we
saw was white clover in patches here and there, and
it gave a most welcome touch to the unfamiliar
scenes. *

The cattle we passed on the way were suffering
dreadfully from another introduction from the States
— the Texas horn-fly, which had recently made its
appearance. The poor beasts were driven half-

137
TIME AND CHANGE

crazy by it, as their sunken eyes and poor condition
plainly showed.

The trail became rougher and steeper as we as-
cended, and the grass and trees gave place to low,
scrubby bushes. We were half an hour or more in
the cloud-belt, where the singing skylarks did not
follow us. The clouds proved to be as loose of tex-
ture and as innocent as any summer fog that loiters
in our valleys; but it was good to emerge into the
sunshine again, and see the jagged line of the top
sensibly nearer, and the canopy of clouds unroll
itself beneath us. Far ahead of us and near the
summit we saw a band of wild goats — twenty-two,
I counted — leisurely grazing along, and now and
then casting glances down upon us. They were
domestic animals gone wild, and still retained their
bizarre colors of white and black. One big black
leader with a long beard looked down at us and
shook his head threateningly. We reached the sum-
mit before the sun reached the horizon, and our eyes
looked forth upon a strange world, indeed. On
one hand the vast sea of cloud, into which the sun
was about to drop, rolled away from the mountain
below us, with its white surface and the irregular
masses rising up from it, suggesting a sea of float-
ing ice. Through rifts in it we caught occasional
glimpses of the Pacific — blue, vague, mystical gulfs
that seemed filled with something less substantial
than water. On the other hand was the vast crater

138
HOLIDAYS IN HAWAII

of Haleakala, two thousand feet deep, and many
miles across, in which the shadows were deepening,
and which looked like some burned-out Hades.

We stood or sat on the jagged edge and saw the
day depart and the night come down, the glory of
cloud and sea and sunset on the one hand, and on
the other side the fearful chasm of the extinct vol-
cano, red and black and barren, with the hosts of
darkness gathering in it. It was like a seat between
heaven and hell. Then later, when the Southern
Cross came out and rose above the awful gulf, the
scene was most impressive.

The crater of Haleakala is said to be the largest
extinct crater in the world. To follow all its out-
lines would lead one a distance of more than twenty
miles, but it is so irregular in shape that one gets
only a poor conception of its extent in a view from
its brink. At its widest part it cannot be more than
four or five miles across. It was evidently formed
by the whole top of the mountain having been blown
out or else sunk down in recent geologic times. The
fragments of jagged rock that thickly strew the sur-
face all about the summit look as if they might have
fallen there. The floor of the interior of the crater
is thickly studded with many minor craters, through
which the internal fires found vent after the crater
as a whole had ceased toact. They areof the shape of
huge haystacks, with a hole in the top, and looked
soft and yielding in outline, and in color as though

: 139
TIME AND CHANGE

they were composed of soot and brick-dust. One of
them is much larger than any of the rest. I thought
it might be two hundred feet high. “It is eight hun-
dred,” said our guide; yet its summit was more than
a thousand feet below the rim upon which we sat.
There has been no eruption in Haleakala since
early in the last century. Over a large area of the
interior the black lava, cracked and crumpled, meets
the eye. Miles down one of its great arms toward
the sea, we could see the green lines of vegetation,
mostly rank ferns, advancing like an invading army.
Far ahead were the skirmishers, loose bands of ferns,
with individual plants here and there pushing on
over the black, uneven surface toward the second-
ary craters of the centre. Vegetation was also
climbing down the ragged sides of the crater, drop-
ping from rock to rock like an invading host. The
ferns, those pioneers of the vegetable world, appear
to come first. Their giant progenitors subdued the
rocks and made the soil in Carboniferous times, and
prepared the way for higher vegetable forms, and
now these striplings take up the same task in this
primitive world of the crater of Haleakala. Their
task is a long and arduous one, much more so than
in those parts of the island where the rainfall is more
copious; but give them time enough, and the barren
lava will all be clothed with verdure. When decom-
posed and ripened by time, it makes a red, heavy
soil that supports many kinds of plants and trees.
140
HOLIDAYS IN HAWAII

The ferns come slowly marching in from without,
but in the centre of the crater, on the slopes of the
red cones and at their bases, is another plant that
seems indigenous, born of the ash and the scoria of
the volcano, and that apparently has no chlorophyl
in its make-up. This is a striking plant, called the
silver sword, from the shape and color of its long,
narrow leaves. They are the color of frosted silver,
and are curved like a sword. It is a strange appari-
tion, white and delicate and rare, springing up in
the crater of a slumbering volcano. A more striking
contrast with the atmosphere of the surroundings
would be hard to find — a suggestion of peace and
purity above the graves of world-destroying forces,
an angel of light nourished by the ashes of the de-
mons of death and darkness.

It is claimed by the people of the island that this
plant is found in no other place on the globe, but
this can hardly be possible. If its evolution took
place in one crater, it would take place in another.
It consists of a great mass of silvery-white, bristling
leaves resting upon the ground, from which rises a
stalk, strung with flowers, to the height of five or
six feet. It is evidently of the Yucca type of plant,
and has met with a singular transformation in the
sleeping volcano’s mouth, all its harsh and savage
character turned into gentleness and grace, its
armament of needles and daggers giving place toa
soft, silvery down. We did not see the plant grow-

141
TIME AND CHANGE

ing except at a great distance, through field-glasses,
but we saw a photograph of it and a dried specimen
after we came down from the summit.

It is an all day’s trip down into the crater and
back, climbing over sliding sands and loose scoria,
and our time was too limited to undertake it. We
passed the night on the summit in a rude stone
hut, which had a fireplace where the guide made
coffee, but we had only the volcanic rock for floor.
Upon this we spread our ample supply of blankets,
and got such sleep as is to be had on high, cold
mountain-tops, where the ribs of the mountain
prove to be so much harder than one’s own ribs —
not a first-class quality of sleep, but better than
none.

I arose about two o’clock, and made my way out
into the star-blazing night. Such glory of thehea-
vens I had never before seen. I had never before
been lifted up so near them, and hence had never
before seen them through so rarefied an atmosphere.
The clouds and vapors had disappeared, and all the
hosts of heaven were magnified. The Milky Way
seemed newly paved and swept. There was no wind
and no sound. The. mighty crater was a gulf of
blackness, but the sky blazed with light.

The dawn comes early on such a mountain-top,
and before four o’clock we were out under the fad-
ing stars. As we had seen the day pass into night,
surrounded by these wonderful scenes, now we saw

142
HOLIDAYS IN HAWAII

the night pass into day, and the elemental grandeur
on every hand reborn before us. There was not a
wisp of cloud or fog below us or about us to blur the
great picture. The sun came up from behind the
vast, long, high wall of the Pacific that filled the
eastern horizon, and the shadows fled from the huge
pile of mountain in the west. We hung about the
rim of the great crater or sat upon the jagged rocks,
wrapped in our blankets, till the sun was an hour
high.

We got another glimpse of the band of goats pick-
ing their way from ledge to ledge far below us on the
side of the crater. I saw and heard two or three
mina birds fly past, apparently seeking new territory
to occupy. These birds are more enterprising than
the English sparrows, which also swarm in the
island towns but do not brave the mountain-
heights. The bird from India seems at home every-
where.

After breakfast we still haunted for an hour or
more the brink of the great abyss, where one seemed
to feel the pulse of primal time, loath to tear our-
selves away, loath also to take a last view of the
panorama of land and sea, lit by the morning sun,
which spread out far below us. To the southeast
we could dimly see the outlines of the island of
Hawaii, with a faint gleam of snow on its great
mountain Mauna Loa, nearly fourteen thousand
feet high. In the northwest a dim, dark mass low

143
TIME AND CHANGE

in the horizon marked the place of Oahu. The
ocean rose in the vast horizon and blended with the
sky. Theeye could not tell where one ended and the
other began.

The mules had had a comfortable night in a rude
stone stable against the rocks, and were more eager
to hit the down trail than were we. The descent
proved more fatiguing than the ascent, the con-
stant plunging motion of the animals’ shoulders
being a sore trial. We dropped down through the
belt of clouds that had begun to form, and out into
the grassy region of the singing skylarks, past herds
of grazing cattle, and at noon were again at Idle-
wild, resting our weary limbs and comforting the
inner man.

In the afternoon Mr. Aiken drove us back to his
home farm, where we again passed a very pleasant
night. In the morning I walked with him through
his pineapple plantation. It was a new kind of farm-
ing and fruit-growing to me. I forget now how
many hundred thousand plants his field contained.
They are set and cultivated much as cabbage is
with us, but present a strangely stiff and forbidding
aspect. The first cutting is when the plants are
about eighteen months old, one large solid apple
from each plant. The second crop is called the
“‘raggoon” crop, and yields two apples from each
plant, but smaller and less valuable than the first.
The field is then reset. I also walked with Mr.

144
HOLIDAYS IN HAWAII

Aiken over some new land he was getting ready for
pineapples. It had been densely covered with lan-
tana scrub, and clearing it and grubbing it out had
been an heroic task. The lantana takes complete
possession of the soil, grows about four or five feet
high, and makes a network of roots in the soil that
defies anything but a steam plow. The soil is a red,
heavy clay, and it made the farmer in me sweat to
think of the expenditure of labor necessary to turn
a lantana bush into a pineapple field. The redness
of this volcanic soil is said to be owing to the fact
that the growth of vegetation brings the iron into
new combinations with organic acids.

Later in the day we visited the large Baldwin
pineapple-canning plant, and were shown the
whole process of preparing and canning the fruit,
and all but surfeited with the most melting and de-
licious pineapples it was ever my good luck to taste.
The Hawaiian pineapple probably surpasses all
others in tenderness and lusciousness, and it loses
scarcely any of these qualities in the cans. Ripened
in the field, where it grew on the flanks of great
Haleakala, and eaten out of hand, it is a dream of
tropic lusciousness. The canning is done by an
elaborate system of machinery managed by Japan-
ese men and women, the naked hand never coming in
contact with the peeled fruit, but protected from it
by long, thin rubber gloves. There ought to be a
great future for this industry, when Eastern con-

145
TIME AND CHANGE

sumers really find out the superior quality of the
Hawaiian product.

From Mr. Aiken’s house one has a view of the
great wall of mountains that form the western and
older — older geologically —end of the island,
in which lies the famous Iao Valley, which I have
already described. We judge, from the much deeper
marks of rain erosion, that this end of the island
is vastly older than the butt end upon which Halea-
kala is situated. Haleakala is eroded comparatively
little. On all its huge northern slope there is only one
considerable gash or gully, and this is probably not
many thousand years old; but the northwestern end
of the island is worn and carved in the most striking
manner. Looking at it that morning, I compared
it to my extended, relaxed hand, the northern end
being gashed and grooved like the sunken spaces be-
tween the fingers, while the southwest end, not more
than ten miles distant, was only slightly grooved and
more like the solid wrist and back hand. All the
rains brought by the northeast trades fall upon the
northeast end of the islands. The mountain-peaks
on the end hold the clouds and strip them dry, so that
little or no rain falls upon the south and southwest
sides. This is true of all the islands. One end of
each is arid and barren, while the other is wet and
verdant. One of the smaller islands, Kahoolawe, I
believe, dominated by Maui on the northeast, is said
to be drying up and blowing away by inches.

146
HOLIDAYS IN HAWAII

What a spell the mountains do lay upon the
clouds everywhere, — the robber mountains, — in
these islands exacting the last drop of water of all
the ocean-born vapors that pass over them! On the
northeast side of the Lahaina district there are val-
leys four or five thousand feet deep; on the southwest
side there are no valleys worth mentioning. The
difference in this respect was forcibly brought home
to me when, later in the day, we made an automo-
bile trip from Wailuku to Lahaina on the south-
west side; in going less than twenty miles we quickly
passed from the region of verdant valleys and
mountain-slopes into a hard, raw, barren, unweath-
ered region, where there was no soil, and where the
rocks looked as crude and forbidding as they must
have looked the day they flowed out from the
depths as molten lava. In outline the island of
Maui suggests a truncated statue, the west end
representing the head, very old and wrinkled and
grooved by time and trouble, the peninsula’ the
well-proportioned neck, and broad-breasted Halea-
kala forming the trunk. What a torso it is, fire-
born and basking there in the tropic seas!

The oldest island of the Hawaiian group is Kauai,
called the garden island, because it has much the
deepest and most fertile soil. It shows much more
evidence of erosion than any of the other islands.
The next in point of erosion, and hence in point
of age, is Oahu, upon which Honolulu is situated.

147
TIME AND CHANGE

Then come Molokai and Maui, the two ends of the
latter being of vastly unequal age. Hawaii, the
largest of them all, nearly as large as Connecticut,
is the youngest of the group, and shows the least
effects of erosion. When it is as old as Kauai is now,
its two huge mountains, Mauna Loa and Mauna
Kea, will probably be cut up into deep valleys and
cafions and sharp, high ridges, as are the mountains
of Kauai and Oahu. The lapse of time required to
bring about such a result is beyond all human cal-
culation. Whether one million or two millions of
years would do.it, who knows? Those warm tropi-
cal rains, aided by the rank vegetation which they
beget and support, dissolve the volcanic rock slowly
but inevitably.

Through the courtesy of Mr. Lowell, the super-
intendent, we had that day the pleasure of going
through a large sugar-making plant at Paia — one
that turns out nearly fifty thousand tons of sugar a
year. We saw the cane come in from the fields in one
end of the plant, and the dry, warm product being
put up in bags at the other. All the latest devices
and machinery for sugar-making we saw here in full
operation, affording a contrast to the crude and
wasteful methods I had seen in the island of Jamaica
a few years before.

In the afternoon we availed ourselves of the five
or six miles of narrow-gauge railway, the only one on
the island, to go from Paia to Wailuku, where we

148
HOLIDAYS IN HAWAII

were met by another automobile, which hurried us
to Lahaina, where we were to meet the steamer
that was to convey us to Hilo, on Hawaii. I say
“hurried,” but before the journey of twenty-odd
miles was half over, we realized the truth of the old
adage, “The more haste, the less speed.” The
automobile began to sulk and finally could be per-
suaded to go only on the low gear, and to rattle
along at about the speed of a man with a horse and
buggy. We reached Lahaina just as the boat was
entering the harbor.

The next morning we found ourselves steaming
along past the high, verdant shores of Hawaii. For
fifty miles or more the land presented one unbroken
expanse of sugar-cane, suggesting fields of some
gigantic yellow-green grass. At Hilo the sun was
shining between brief showers, and the air was warm
and muggy. It is said to rain there every day in the
year, and the lush vegetation made the statement
seem credible. Judge Andrews met us at the steamer,
and took us to his home for rest and dinner, and was
extremely kind to us.

In the mid-afternoon we took the train for
Glenwood, thirty miles on our way to the volcano
of Kilauea. A large part of the way the road leads
through sugar plantations, newly carved out of the
koa and tree-fern wilderness that originally covered
the volcanic soil. Clusters of the little houses of the
Japanese laborers, verched high above the ground

149
TIME AND CHANGE

on slender posts, were passed here and there. Ev-
erywhere we saw wooden aqueducts, or flumes,
winding around the contours of the hills and across
the little valleys, often on high trestle-work, and
partly filled with clear, swift-running water, in
which the sugar-cane was transported to the mills.

At Glenwood stages meet the tourists and convey
them over a fairly good road that winds through the
tree-fern forests to the Volcano House, ten miles
away. The beauty of that fern-lined forest, the
long, stately plumes of the gigantic ferns meeting the
eye everywhere, I shall not soon forget. I saw what
appeared to be a large, showy red raspberry grow-
ing by the roadside, but I did not find it at all
tempting to the taste.

It was dark when we reached the Volcano House,
and we saw off to the left a red glow upon the fog-
clouds, like the reflected light from a burning barn
or house in the country, and inferred at once that
it came from the volcano, which it did. From my
window that night, as I lay in bed, I could see
this same angry glow upon the clouds. The smell
of sulphur was in the air about the hotel, and very
hot steam was issuing from cracks in the rocks. A
party of tourists on horseback, in the spirit of true
American hurry, visited the volcano that night, but
we chose to wait until the morrow.

The next morning the great crater of Kilauea was
filled with fog, but it lifted, and the sun shone be-

150
HOLIDAYS IN HAWAII

fore noon. We passed a pleasant forenoon strolling
along the tree-fringed brink, looking down eight or
nine hundred feet upon its black lava floor, and
plucking ohelo berries, which grew there abund-
antly, a kind of large, red huckleberry that one could
eat out of hand, but that one could not get excited
over. They were better in a pie than in the hand.
Their name seemed to go well with the suggestion of
the scenes amid which they grew. Kilauea is a round
extinct crater about three miles across and seven
or eight hundred feet deep. It has been the scene
of terrific explosions in past ages, but it has now
dwindled to the small active crater of Halemaumau,
which is sunk near the middle of it like a huge pot,
two hundred or more feet deep and a thousand feet
across.

In the mid-afternoon a party of eight or ten of us
on horseback set out to visit the volcano. The trail
led down the broken and shelving side of the crater,
amid trees and bushes, till it struck the floor of lava
at the bottom. In going down I was aware all the
time of a beautiful bird-song off on my left, a song
almost as sweet as that of our hermit thrush, but of
an entirely different order. I think it was the song —
of one of the honey-suckers, a red bird with black
wings that in flight looked like our scarlet tanager.

Our course took us out over the cracked and con-
torted lava-beds, where no green thing was growing.
The forms of the lava-flow suggested mailed and

151
TIME AND CHANGE

writhing dragons, with horrid, gaping mouths and
vicious claws. The lava crunched beneath the
horses’ feet like shelly and brittle ice. At one point
we passed over a wide, jagged crack on a bridge.
As we neared the crater, the rocks grew warm, and
sulphur and other fumes streaked the air.

When a half-mile from the crater we dismounted,
and, leaving our horses in charge of the guide, pro-
ceeded on foot over the cracked and heated lava
rocks toward the brink of this veritable devil’s
caldron. The sulphur fumes are so suffocating that
it can be approached only on the windward side.
The first glance into that fearful pit is all that your
imagination can picture it. You look upon the tra-
ditional lake of brimstone and fire, and if devils
were to appear skipping about over the surface with
pitchforks, turning their victims as the cook turns
her frying crullers in the sputtering fat, it would
not much astonish you. This liquid is rather thick
and viscid, but it is boiling furiously. Great masses
of it are thrown up forty or fifty feet, and fall with
a crash like that of the surf upon the shore. Livid
jets are thrown up many feet high against the sides
and drip back, cooling quickly as the lava descends.
We sat or stood upon the brink, at times almost let-
ting our feet hang over the sides, and shielding our
faces from the intense heat with paper masks and
veils. It is probably the only place in the world
where you can come face to face with the heart of

152
HOLIDAYS IN HAWAII

an active volcano. There are no veils of vapor to
hide it from you. It appears easy enough to cast a
stone into the midst of it, but none of us could quite
do it.

The mass of boiling lava is said to be about one
and one half acres in extent. Its surface is covered
with large masses of floating crust, black and
smooth, like leather or roofing-paper, and between
these masses, or islands, the molten lava shows in
broad, vivid lines. It is never quiet. When not
actually boiling, there is a slow circulatory move-
ment, and the great flakes of black crust, suggest-
ing scum, drift across from one end to the other and
are drawn under the rocks. At one moment only this
movement is apparent, then suddenly the mass be-
gins to boil furiously all over the surface, and you
hear dimly the sound of the bursting bubbles and
the crash of the falling lava. When this takes place,
the black floating masses are broken up and scat-
tered as they are in boiling maple-syrup, but they
quickly reunite, and are carried on by the current
as before.

Looking upon this scene with the thought of the
traditional lake of fire and brimstone of our fore-
fathers in mind, you would say that these black,
filthy-looking masses floating about on the surface
were the accumulation of all the bad stuff that had
been fried out of the poor sinners since hell was in-
vented. How much wickedness and uncharity and

153
TIME AND CHANGE

evil thought it would represent! If the poor victims
were clarified and made purer by the process, then it
would seem worth while.

At the Volcano House they keep a book in which
tourists write down their impressions of the volcano.
A distinguished statesman had been there a fewdays
before us, and had written a long account of his
impressions, closing with this oratorical sentence:
“No pen, however gifted, can describe, no brush,
however brilliant, can portray, the wonders we have
been permitted to behold.” I could not refrain from
writing under it, “I have seen the orthodox hell,
and it’s the real thing.”

That huge kettle of molten metal, mantling and
bubbling, how it is impressed upon my memory!
It is a vestige of the ancient cosmic fire that once
wrapped the whole globe in its embrace. It had a
kind of brutal fascination. One could not take one’s
eyes from it. That network of broad, jagged, fiery
lines defining those black, smooth masses, or islands,
of floating matter told of a side of nature we had
never before seen. We lingered there on the brink
of the fearful spectacle till night came on, and the
sides of the mighty caldron, and the fog-clouds
above it, glowed in the infernal light. Not so white
as the metal pouring from a blast furnace, not so hot,
a more sullen red, but welling up from the central
primordial fires of the earth. This great pot has
boiled over many times in the recent past, as the

154
HOLIDAYS IN HAWAII

lava-beds we traveled over testify, and it will
probably boil over again. It has been unusually
active these last few years.

About nine o’clock we rode back, facing a cold, ,
driving mist, the back of each rider, protected by
the shining yellow “‘slickers,” glowing to the one
behind him, in the volcano’s light, till we were a
mile or more away.

The next morning came clear, and the sight of the
mighty slope of Mauna Loa, lit up by the rising sun,
was a grand spectacle. It looked gentle and easy of
ascent, wooded here and there, and here and there
showing broad, black streaks from the lava over-
flows at the summit in recent years; but remember-
ing that it was nearly four thousand feet higher than
Haleakala, I had no desire to climb it. This moun-
tain and its companion, Mauna Kea, are the high-
est island mountains in the world. .

The stage rolled us back through the fern forest
to the railway station and thence on to Hilo again,
where in good time, in the afternoon, we went
aboard the steamer; and the next morning we were
again in the harbor of Honolulu, glad we had made
the inter-island trip, and above all glad that we had
seen Haleakala.
VI
THE OLD ICE-FLOOD

I

E was a bold man who first conceived the idea

of the great continental ice-sheet which in
Pleistocene times covered most of the northern part
of the continent, and played such a part in shaping
the land as we know it. That bold man was Agas-
siz, who, however, was not bold enough to accept
the theory of evolution as propounded by Darwin.
The idea of the great glacier did not conflict with
Agassiz’s religious predilections, and the theory of
evolution did. It was a bold generalization, this of
the continental ice-sheet, one of the master-strokes
of the scientific imagination. It was about the year
1840 that Agassiz, fresh from the glaciersof the Alps,
went to Scotland looking for the tracks of the old
glaciers, and he found them at once when he landed
near Glasgow. We can all find them now on almost
every walk we take to the fields and hills; but until
our eyes are opened, how blind we are to them!
We are like people who camp on the trail of an
army and never suspect an army has passed, though
the ruts made by their wagons and artillery and

157
TIME AND CHANGE

the ruins of their intrenchments are everywhere
visible.

When I was a boy on the farm we never asked
ourselves questions about the stones and rocks that
encumbered the land — whence they came, or what
the agency was that brought them. The farmers
believed the land was created just as we saw it —
stones, boulders, soil, gravel-pits, hills, mountains,
and all— and doubtless wished in their hearts
that the Creator had not been so particular about
the rocks and stones, or had made an exception
in favor of their own fields. Rocks and stones were
good for fences and foundations, and for various
other uses, but they were a great hindrance to the
cultivation of the soil. I once heard a farmer boast
that he had very strong land — it had to be strong
to hold up such a crop of rocks and stones. When
the Eastern farmer moved west into the prairie
states, or south into the cotton-growing states,
he probably never asked himself why the Creator
had not cumbered the ground with rocks and stones
in those sections, as he had in New York and New
England. South of the line that runs irregularly
through middle New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio,
Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, and so on to the Rockies,
he will find few loose stones scattered over the soil,
no detached boulders sitting upon the surface, no
hills or mounds of gravel and sand, no clay banks
packed full of rounded stones, little and big, no

158
THE OLD ICE-FLOOD

rocky floors under the soil which look as if they had
been dressed down by a huge but dulled and nicked
jack-plane. The reason is that the line I have
indicated marks the limit of the old ice-sheet which
more than a hundred thousand years ago covered
all the northern part of the continent to a depth of
from two to four thousand feet, and was the chief
instrument in rounding off mountain-tops, scatter-
ing rock-fragments, little and big, over our land-
scapes, grinding down and breaking off the protrud-
ing rock strata, building up our banks of mingled
-clay and stone, changing the courses of streams and
rivers, deepening and widening our valleys, trans-
planting boulders of one formation for hundreds of
miles, and dropping them upon the surface of an-
other formation. When it began to melt and re-
treat, it was the chief agent in building up our river
terraces, and our long, low, rounded hills of sand
and gravel and clay, called kames and drumlins.
In many of our valleys its flowing waters left long,
low ridges, gentle in outline, made up entirely of
sand and gravel, or of clay. In other places it left
moraines made up of earth, gravel, and rock-frag-
ments that make a very rough streak through the
farmer’s land. All those high, level terraces along
the Hudson, such as that upon which West Point
stands, were the work of the old ice-sheet that once
filled the river valley. The melting ice was also the
chief agent in building up the enormous clay-banks
159
TIME AND CHANGE

that are found along the shores of the Hudson.
The clay formed in very still waters, the sand and
gravel in more active waters.

This great ice-sheet not only covered our northern
farms with rocks and stones, and packed the soil
with rounded boulders, but it also carried away
much of the rock decay that goes to the making of
the soil, so that the soil is of greater depth in the
non-glaciated than in the glaciated areas of the
country. The New-Englander or New-Yorker in
traveling in the Southern States may note the enor-
mous depth of soil as revealed by the water-courses
or railroad cuts. The ice-sheet was a huge mill that
ground up the rocks in the North probably as fast
or faster than the rains and the rank vegetation
reduced them in the South, but the floods of water
which it finally leteloose carried a great deal of the
,tock-waste into the sea.

The glacier milk which colors the streams that
flow from beneath it finally settles and makes clay.
Off the great Malaspina Glacier in Alaskatheoceanis
tinged by the glacier milk for nearly fifty miles from
the shores. Very few country people, even among
the educated, are ready to believe that this enor-
mous ice-sheet ever existed. To make them believe
that it is just as much a fact in the physical history
of this continent as the war of the Revolution is a
fact in our political history is no easy matter. It
certainly is a crushing proposition. It so vastly

160
THE OLD ICE-FLOOD

transcends all our experience with ice and snow, or
the experience of the race since the dawn of history,
that only the scientific imagination and faith are
equal to it. The belief in it rests on indubitable evi-
dence, its record is written all over our landscape,
but it requires, I say, the scientific imagination to
put the facts together and make a continuous his-
tory.

Three or four hundred feet above my cabin, five
or six hundred feet above tidewater, there is a bold
rocky point upon which the old ice-sheet bore heav-
ily. It has rubbed it down and flattened it as a
hand passing over a knob of soft putty might do.
The great hand in this case moved from the north-
east and must have fairly made this rocky promin-
ence groan with its weight. The surface, scratched
and grooved and planed by the ice, has weathered
away, leaving the rock quite rough; its general out-
lines alone tell the tale of the battle with the ice.
But on the east side a huge mass of rock, that had
been planed and gouged by the glacier, was detached
and toppled over, turning topsy-turvy before it had
weathered, and it lies in such a position, upheld
by two rock fragments, that its glaciated surface,
though protected from the weather, is clearly visi-
ble. You step down two or three feet between the
two upholding rocks and are at the entrance of a
little cave, and there before you, standing at an
angle of thirty or forty degrees, is this rocky page

161
TIME AND CHANGE

written over with the history of the passing of the
great ice plane. The surface exposed is ten or twelve
feet long, and four or five feet wide, and it is as
straight and smooth, and the scratches and grooves
are as sharp and distinct as if made yesterday. I
often take the college girls there who come to visit
me, to show them, as I tell them, where the old ice
gods left their signatures. The girls take turns in
stooping down and looking along the under surface
of the rock, and feeling it with their hands, and
marveling. They have read or heard about these
things, but the reading or hearmg made little im-
pression upon their minds. When they see a con-
crete example, and feel it with their hands, they are
impressed. Then when I tell them that there is not
a shadow of a doubt but that the ice was at one time
two or three thousand feet thick above the place
where they now stand, and that it bore down upon
Julian’s Rock with a weight of thousands of tons to
the square foot, that it filled all the Hudson River
Valley, and covered the landscape for thousands of
miles around them, riding over the tops of the Cat-
skills and of the Adirondacks, and wearing them
down and carrying fragments of rock torn from
them hundreds of miles to the south and southwest,
— when I have told them all of this, I have usually
given them a mouthful too big for them to masticate
or swallow. As a sort of abstract proposition con-
tained in books, or heard in the classroom, they do
162
THE OLD ICE-FLOOD

not mind it, but as an actual fact, here in the light
of common day on the hill above Slabsides, with the
waters of the Hudson glistening below, and the trees
tustling in the wind all about us, that is quite an-
other matter. It sounds like a dream or a fable.
Many of the processes that have made our globe
what we see it have been so slowand on such a scale
that they are quite beyond our horizon — beyond
the reach of our mental apprehension. The mind
has to approach them slowly and tentatively, and
become familiar with the idea of them, before it can
give any sort of rational assent to them. It has
taken the geologist a long time to work out and
clear up and confirm this conception of the great
continental glacier which in Pleistocene times cov-
ered so large a part of the northern hemisphere.
It is now as well established as any event in the re-
mote past well can be. In Alaska, and in the Swiss
Alps, one may see the ice doing exactly what the
Pleistocene ice-sheet did over this country.

I

The other day in passing a farmer’s house I saw
where he had placed a huge, roundish boulder,
nearly as high as a man’s head, by the roadside and
had cut upon it his own name and date, and that of
his father before him, and that of the first settler
upon the farm, in the latter part of the eighteenth
century. It was an- interesting monument. I

163
TIME AND CHANGE

learned that the rock had been found in the bed of
a small creek near by, and that the farmer had given
a hundred dollars to have it moved to its place in
front of his house. Had I seen the old farmer I am
sure I could have added to his interest and pride
in his monument by telling him that it was Adiron-
dack gneiss, and had been brought from that region
on the back, or in the maw, of a glacier, many tens
of thousands of years ago. But it is highly probable
that, were he an uneducated man, he would have
treated my statement with contempt or incredulity.
Education does at least this for a man: it opens his
mind and makes him less skeptical about things not
dreamed of in his philosophy.

This boulder had been rolled and worn in its long,
slow ride till it was nearly round. I have a much
smaller boulder, probably from the same quarry,
which I planted at the head of my garden for a seat
when the hoe gets tired. When it was dropped here
on the land that is now my field, the bed and valley
of the Hudson were occupied by the old glacier
which, during its decline and recession, built up
the terraces opposite me (where now stands a
multimillionaire’s copy of an Italian palace), and
which added to and uncovered the river slopes where
now my own vineyards are planted.

The flowing or the creeping of this old ice-sheet,
so that it could transport large boulders hundreds
of miles, is one of the most remarkable things about

164
THE OLD ICE-FLOOD

it: as slow or slower than the hour-hand of the
clock, yet an actual progression, carrying it, in the
course of thousands of years, from its apex in
Labrador well down into New Jersey, where its
terminal moraine is still clearly traceable.

A river of ice, under the right conditions, flows as
literally as a river of water, fastest in the middle,
and slowest along its margins where the friction is
greatest. The old ice-sheet, or ice sea, flowed around
and over mountains as a river flows around and over
rocks. Where a mountain rose above the glacier,
the ice divided and flowed round it, and reunited
again beyond it. One may see all] this in Alaska at
the present time. Water, of course, flows because of
its own pressure; so does ice, only the pressure has
to be vastly greater. A drop of water on the table
does not flow, but, pile it high enough, and it will.
The old ice sea flowed mainly south, not because it
was downhill in that direction, but because the
accumulation of ice and snow at the North was so
great. If through any climatic changes, the snow-
fall were ever again to be so great that more snow
should fall in winter than could melt in summer,
after the lapse of thousands of years, we should
have another ice age.
VII
THE FRIENDLY SOIL’

NEVER tire of contemplating the soil itself, the

mantle rock, as the geologist callsit. It clothes
the rocky framework of the earth as the flesh clothes
our bones. It is the seat of the vitality of the globe,
the youngest part, the growing, changing part. Out
of it we came, and to it we return. It is literally our
mother, as the sun is our father.

The soil! — the residuum of the rocks, the ashes of
the mountains. We know what a vast stretch of
time has gone to the making of it; that it has been
baked and boiled and frozen and thawed, acted
upon by sun and star and wind and rain; mixed and
remixed and kneaded and added to, as the house-
wife kneads and moulds her bread; that it has lain
under the seas in the stratified rocks for incalculable
ages; that chemical and mechanical and vital forces
have all had a hand in its preparation; that the vast
cycles of animal and vegetable life of the foreworld
have contributed to its fertility; that the life of the
sea, and the monsters of the earth, and the dragons
of the air, have left their ashes here, so that when I
stir it with my hoe, or turn it with my spade, I know

167
TIME AND CHANGE

I am stirring or turning the meal of a veritable grist
of the gods.

From its primal source in the Archzean rock, up
through all the vast series of sedimentary rocks to
our own time, what vicissitudes and transforma-
tions it has passed through; how many times it has
died, so to speak, and been reborn from the rocks;
how many times the winds and the rains have trans-
ported it, and infused invisible, life-giving gases into
it; how many of the elements have throbbed with
life, climbed and bloomed in trees, walked or flown
or swam in animals, or slumbered for thousands
upon thousands of years beneath the great ice-sheet
of Pleistocene time! A handful of the soil by your
door is probably the most composite thing you can
find in a day’s journey. It may be an epitome of a
whole geological formation, or of two or more of
them. If it happens to be made up of decomposed
limestone, sandstone, slate, and basalt rock, think
what a history would be condensed in it!

Our lawns are made up of ashes from the funeral
pyre of] mountains, of dust from the tombs of geo-
logic ages. What masses of rock does this sandbank
represent! what an enormous grist in the great
glacier mill do these layers of clay stand for! Two
feet of soil probably represent a hundred feet or
more of rock. Strictly speaking, the soil is the insol-
uble parts of the ground-up and decomposed rocks,
after the rains and the winds have done their work

168
THE FRIENDLY SOIL

and taken their toll of the grist they have ground.
Sometimes these mills take the whole grist and leave
the rocks bare; but usually they leave a residuum
in which life strikes its roots. We do not see all that
the waters take from the soil. They have invisible
pockets in which they carry away all the more
soluble parts, such as lime, soda, potash, silica,
magnesia, and others, and leave for the land the more
insoluble parts. These, too, in times of flood they
carry away in suspension, in the shape of sand, silt,
mud, gravel, and the like. When the waters really
digest the rocks, they hold the various minerals in
solution, and run limpid and dancing to the sea;
when they have an undigested burden, they run
angry and turbid.

It is estimated that the Hudson River deposits
in the sea each year four hundred and forty
thousand tons of mineral matter in solution which
it has taken from the land, and the Mississippi one
hundred and twelve million tons. Each carries
away about four times as much in suspension. The
digestive or chemical power of water, then, is only
about one fourth as great as its mechanical power.
Between the two the land is made to pay heavy toll
to the sea. But in time, in geologic time, it all comes
back. The suspended particles are dropped and go
to make up the sedimentary rocks, while the solutes
help cement the material of these rocks together,
and also nourish the sea life from which limestone

169
TIME AND CHANGE

and other organic rocks are made. When these
rocks are again lifted to the surface and disinte-
grated into soil, then the debt of the sea to the land
is paid. This process, this cycle of soil loss and soil
growth, has gone on through all time, and must con-
tinue as long as the rain continues to fall, or as long
as the sea continues to send its tax-gatherers to the
land. In this great cycle of give and take of the
elements, the affairs of men cut but a momentary
figure; how puny they are, how transient! How the
great changes, which in time amount to revolutions,
go on over our heads and under our feet, and we
rarely heed them, and are powerless to stay them!
A summer shower carries the soil of my side-hill,
which is mainly disintegrated Silurian rock and
shale, into the river, and some millions of years
hence, when it has become stratified rock, and been
lifted up into the light of day, some other, and, I
trust, wiser husbandman, will be gathering his har-
vest from it, and be worried over the downpour
that robs him of it. The farmer’s worry is bound to
come back with the soil, and be passed along with it.
VU
PRIMAL ENERGIES

OW puny and meagre is the utmost power man
can put forth, even by the aid of all his
mechanical appliances, when compared with the
primal earth forces! Think, or try to think, of the
force of pressure that causes the rock-strata to
buckle or crumple or bend — layers of rock, thou-
sands of feet thick, made to fold and bend like the
leaves of a book —vast mountain-chains flexed and
foreshortened, or ruptured and faulted as the bend-
ing of one’s body wrinkles or rips one’s clothes.
Think of the over-thrusts and the folding and shear-
ing of the earth’s crust. The shrinking of the earth
squeezes the rocks to an extent quite beyond our
power of conception. “So overpowering has been
the horizontal movement in some cases,” says
Dana, “that masses of rock thousands of feet in
thickness have been buckled up and sheared, or,
simply yielding to pressure, have sheared without
folding, and been thrust forward for miles along a
gently inclined plane. These great reversed faults
are termed over-thrusts or thrust-planes. Some-
times such thrust-planes occur singly, at other times
the rocks have yielded again and again, great sheets
, having been sliced off successively, and driven for-
171
TIME AND CHANGE

ward one upon the other.” In northern Montana
there is an over-thrust of the Cambrian rocks upon
the late Cretaceous, of seven or eight miles, carry-
ing with it what is now called “Chief Mountain,”
which has been carved out of the extreme end of the
over-thrust. The contemplation of ‘such things gives
one a sense of power in Nature beyond anything else
I know of. The shrinking of the globe as a whole
makes its rocky garment too big for it, and this
titanic wrinkling and folding results. When the
strata snap asunder under the strain, we have earth-
quakes. During the recent San Francisco earth-
quake, Mount Tamalpais, across the bay, and all
the neighboring heights, were permanently shifted
eight or ten feet. The sides of the mountain, it is
said, undulated like a curtain. And this shaking
and twitching of the great rocky skin of the earth
was vastly less, in proportion to the size of the globe,
than the twitching and trembling of the skin of a
horse when he would shake off the flies, in compari-
son with the animal’s body.

We see another exhibition of the magnitude of the
earth’s forces in what the geologist calls a “lacco-
lite’? — a great cave or cistern deep beneath the
surface of stratified rock filled with hardened lava.
The lava is forced up from an unknown depth under
such pressure that, not finding an outlet at the sur-
face, the rock strata, hundreds or thousands of feet
thick, are lifted up and arched like so much paper,

172
PRIMAL ENERGIES

and in the cavity thus formed the pent-up molten
lava finds relief. These lava cisterns or pockets are
sometimes uncovered by the process of erosion.
The Henry Mountains in Utah are all laccolites.
One of them, Mount Hillers, has a volume of about
ten cubic miles. Much of the overarching sedimen-
tary strata still covers it. Geologists read the evi-
dence of a similar formation called a “sill” on the
west side of the Hudson in New Jersey, forming the
Palisades. The lava worked like a giant mole up
through and then beneath the Triassic sandstone,
lifting the strata up and arching them over a large
area. During the millions of years that have elapsed
since that time, the layers of superincumbent sand-
stone have been worn away so that now one sees a
wide, smooth, gentle slope of basaltic rock covered
by a very thin coat of soil. As one goes by on the
train, one sees where the workmen of a stone-crush-
ing plant have cut into the slope and uncovered the
junction of the two kinds of rock, one born of water,
and one born of fire. The igneous rock sits squarely
upon the level sandstone, like a row of upright
books standing upon a shelf. I never pass the place
but that I want to stop the train and get out and
have a close look at the precise spot where this son
of Vulcan sat down so heavily and so hot upon his
brother of the sedimentary deposits.

Probably no two chapters of the earth’s history
differ more than those of the two sides of the Hud-

173
TIME AND CHANGE

son at New York. There is a great break here —
a leap from Archzean times on the east side to Meso-
zoic times on the west. The east side is millions
of years the older. Here is the original Plutonic
or Azoic rock which apparently has never been un-
der the sea since it was first thrust up out of the
fiery depths. The west shore, including the Palisades,
belongs to a much later geologic era. The original
granite here is buried under vast deposits of sedi-
mentary rock of the Triassic age — the age of the
giant reptiles, the remains of one of which has re-
cently been found embedded in this sandstone, near
the river’s edge. As the traveler’s eye follows along
the even, almost level line of this escarpment of the
Palisades, let it re-create for him the strata of the old
Triassic sandstone that were millions of years ago
piled high upon it, — how high can only be conject-
ured, — but which have been removed grain by grain
under the eroding power of the forces of air and water
that now seem to caress the huge wall so gently. Ah!
geologic Time, wliat can it not do? what has it not
done? The old sill of Vulcan now presents a nearly
vertical front to the Hudson, forming the Palisades,
showing that some leaves of the earth’s history here
are missing, buried probably beneath the waters of
the river. There is evidently a line of fault here,
and the west side has been lifted up out of the old
Mesozoic seas, probably in the convulsions that
poured out the lava of the trap rock.
IX
SCIENTIFIC FAITH

FIND myself accepting certain things on the

authority of science which so far transcend my
experience, and the experience of the race and all
the knowledge of the world, in fact which come so
near being unthinkable, that I call my acceptance
of them an act of scientific faith. One’s reason may
be convinced and yet the heart refuse to believe.
It is not so much a question of evidence as a ques-
tion of capacity to receive evidence of an unusual
kind.

One of the conclusions of science which I feel
forced to accept, and yet which I find very hard
work to believe, is that of the animal origin of man.
I suppose my logical faculties are convinced, but
what is that in me that is baffled, and that hesitates
and demurs?

The idea of the origin of man.from some lower
form requires such a plunge into the past, and such
a faith in the transforming power of the biological
laws, and in the divinity that lurks in the soil under-
foot and streams from the orbs overhead, that the
ordinary mind is quite unequal to the task. For the
book of Genesis of the old Bible we have substituted

175
TIME AND CHANGE

the book of genesis of the rocky scripture of the
globe — a book torn and mutilated, that has been
through fire and flood and earthquake shock, that
has been in the sea and on the heights, and that only
the paleontologist can read or decipher correctly,
but which is a veritable bible of the succession of life
ontheearth. The events of the days of creation are
recorded here, but they are days of such length that
they are to be reckoned only in millions of years.

The evolution of the horse, according to the best
and latest research, from the eohippus of Eocene
times — a small mammal no larger than the fox —
to the proud and fleet creature that we prize to-day,
occupied four or five millions of years. Think of that
first known progenitor of the horse as never dying,
but living on through the geological ages and being
slowly, ob, so slowly, modified by its environment,
changing its teeth, its hoofs, enlarging its body,
lengthening its limbs, and so on, till it becomes the
horse we know to-day.

In accepting the theory of the animal origin of
man we have got to follow man back, not only till
we find him a naked savage like the Fuegians as
Darwin describes them, — naked, bedaubed with
paint, with matted hair and looks wild and distrust-
ful, —but we cannot stop there, we must follow him
back till he becomes a troglodyte, a cave-dweller,
contending with the cave bear, the cave lion, and
the hyena for the possession of this rude shelter;

176
SCIENTIFIC FAITH

back still, till we find him in trees living like the
anthropoid apes; then back to the earth again to
some four-footed creature, probably of the marsu-
pial kind; still the trail leads downward and ever
downward, till we lose it in that maze of marine
forms that swarm in the Paleozoic seas, or until
the imagination is baffled and refuses to proceed.
It certainly is a hard proposition, and it puts one
upon his mettle to accept it.

Should we not find equal difficulty in believing
the life-history of each one of us, — the start in the
germ, then the vague suggestion of fish, and frog,
and reptile, in our foetal life, — were it not a matter
of daily experience? Let it be granted that the race
of man was born as literally out of the animal forms
below him as the child is born out of these vague,
prenatal animal forms in its mother’s womb. Yet
the former fact so far transcends our experience,
and even our power of imagination, that we can
receive it only by an act of scientific faith, as our
fathers received the dogmas of the Church by an act
of religious faith.

I confess that I find it hard work to get on intimate
terms with evolution, familiarize my mind with it,
and make it thinkable. The gulf that separates man
from the orders below him is so impassable, his intelli-
gence is so radically different from theirs, and his
progress so enormous, while they have stood still,
that believing it is like believing a miracle.

177
TIME AND CHANGE

That the apparently blind groping and experi-
mentation which mark the course of evolution as re-
vealed by paleontology — the waste, the delay, the
vicissitudes, the hit-and-miss method — should have
finally resulted in this supreme animal, man, puts
our scientific faith to the test. In the light of evo-
lution how the halo with which we have surrounded
our origin vanishes!

Man has from the earliest period believed himself
of divine origin, and by the divine he has meant
something far removed from this earth and all its
laws and processes, something quite transcending
the mundane forces. He has invented or dreamed
myths and legends to throw the halo of the excep-
tional, the far removed, the mystical, or the divine
around his origin. He has spurned the clod with his
foot; he has denied all kinship with bird and. beast
around him, and looked to the heavens above for the
sources of his life. And then unpitying science comes
along and tells him that he is under the same law as
the life he treads under foot, and that that law is
adequate to transform the worm into the man; that
he, too, has groveled in the dust, or wallowed in the
slime, or fought and reveled, a reptile among rep-
tiles; that the heavens above him, to which he turns
with such awe and reverence, or such dread and fore-
boding, are the source of his life and hope in no other
sense than they are the source of the life and hope
of all other creatures. But this is the way of science;

178
SCIENTIFIC FAITH

it enhances the value or significance of everything
about us that we are wont to treat as cheap or vul-
gar, and it discounts the value of the things far off
upon which we have laid such stress. It ties us to the
earth, it calls in the messengers we send forth into
the unknown; it makes the astonishing revelation —
revolutionary revelation, I may say — that the
earth is embosomed in the infinite heavens the same
as the stars that shine above us, that the creative
energy is working now and here underfoot, the same
as in the ages of myth and miracle; in other words,
that God is really immanent in his universe, and in-
separable from it; that we have been in heaven and
under the celestial laws all our lives, and knew it not.
Science thus kills religion, poetry, and romance only
so far as it dispels our illusions and brings us back
from the imaginary to the common and the near at
hand. It discounts heaven in favor of earth. It
should make us more at home in the world, and
more conscious of the daily beauty and wonders that
surround us, and, if it does not, the trouble is proba-
bly in the ages of myth and fable that lie behind us
and that have left their intoxicating influence in our
blood.

We are willing to be made out of the dust of the
earth when God makes us, the God we have made
ourselves out of our dreams and fears and aspira-
tions, but we are not willing to be made out of the
dust of the earth when the god called Evolution

179
TIME AND CHANGE

makes us. An impersonal law or process we cannot
revere or fear or worship or exalt; we can only study
it and put it to the test. We can love or worship
only personality. This is why science puts such
a damper upon us; it banishes personality, as we
have heretofore conceived it, ftom the universe.
The thunder is no longer the voice of God, the earth
is no longer his footstool. Personality appears only
in man; the universe is not inhuman, but unhuman.
It is this discovery that we recoil from, and blame
science for; and until, in the process of time, we
shall have adjusted our minds, and especially our
emotions, to it, mankind will still recoil from it.

We love our dreams, our imaginings, as we love
a prospect before our houses. We love an outlook
into the ideal, the unknown in our lives. But we
love also to feel the solid ground beneath our feet.

Whether life loses in charm as we lose our illusions,
and whether it gains in power and satisfaction as we
more and more reach solid ground in our beliefs, is
a question that will be answered differently by differ-
ent persons.

We have vastly more solid knowledge about the
universe amid which we live than had our fathers,
but are we happier, better, stronger? May it not
be said that our lives consist, not in the number of
things we know any more than in the number of
things we possess, but in the things we love, in the
depth and sincerity of our emotions, and in the ele-

180
SCIENTIFIC FAITH

vation of our aspirations? Has not science also en-
larged the sphere of our love, and given us new
grounds for wonder and admiration? It certainly
has, but it as certainly has put a damper upon our
awe, our reverence, our veneration. However val-
uable these emotions are, and whatever part they
may have played in the development of character
in the past, they seem doomed to play less and
less part in the future. Poetry and religion, so
called, seem doomed to play less and less part in the
life of the race in the future. We shall still dream
and aspire, but we shall not tremble and worship
as in the past.

We see about us daily transformations as stu-
pendous as that of the evolution of man from the
lower animals, and we marvel not. We see the inor-
ganic pass into the organic, we see iron and lime and
potash and silex blush in the flowers, sweeten in the
fruit, ripen in the grain, crimson in the blood, and
we marvel not. We see the spotless pond-lily rising
and unfolding its snowy petals, and its trembling
heart of gold, from the black slime of the pond. We
contemplate our own life-history as shown in our
pre-natal life, and we are not disturbed. But when
we stretch this process out through the geologic ages
and try to see ourselves a germ, a fish, a reptile, in
the womb of time, we are balked. We donot see the
great mother, or the great father, or feel the lift of the
great biologic laws. We are beyond our depth. It

181
TIME AND CHANGE ,

is easy to believe that the baby is born of woman,
because it is a matter of daily experience, but it is
not easy to believe that man is born of the animal
world below him, and that that is born of inorganic
Nature, because the fact is too big and tremendous.

What we call Nature works in no other way; one
law is over big and little alike. What Nature does
in a day typifies what she does in an eternity. It is
when we reach the things done on such an enormous
scale of time and power and size that we are helpless.
The almost infinitely slow transformations that the
theory of evolution demands balk us as do the size
and distance of the fixed stars.

No observation or study of evolution on a small
scale and near at hand in the familiar facts of the
life about us can prepare us for it, any more than lake
and river can prepare us for the ocean, or the model-
ing of miniature valleys and mountains by the rain
in the clay bank can open our minds to receive the
tremendous facts of the carving of the face of the
continent by the same agents.

We do not see evolution working in one day, or in
a century, or in many centuries. Neither do we
catch the gods of erosion at their Herculean tasks.
They always seem to be having a holiday, or else to
be merely toying with their work.

When we see a mound of earth or a bank of clay
worn into miniature mountain-chains and cafions
and gulches by the rains of a season, we do not

182
SCIENTIFIC FAITH

doubt our eyes; we know the rains did it. But when
we see the same thing copied in a broad landscape,
or on the face of a state or a continent, we find it
hard to believe the evidence of our own senses. The
scale upon which it is done, and the time involved,
put it so far beyond the sphere of our experience
that something in us, probably the practical, every-
day man, refuses to be convinced.

The lay mind can hardly have any adequate con-
ception of the part erosion, the simple weathering
of the rocks, has played in shaping our landscapes,
and in preparing the earth for the abode of man.
The changes in the surface of the land in one’s life-
time, or even in the historic period, are so slight
that the tales the geologists tell us are incredible.

When, during a recent trip through the great
Southwest, I saw the earth laid open by erosion as
I had never before dreamed of, especially when I
visited those halls of the gods, the Grand Cafion
and Yosemite Valley, I found my capacity to believe
in the erosive power of water and the weather quite
overtaxed. It must be true, I said, what the geol-
ogists tell us, that water and air did all this; but
while you look and wait, and while generations
before you have looked and waited, all is as quiet
and passive as if the slumber of ages wrapped hill
and vale. Invisible giants have wrought and delved
here of whom we never catch a glimpse, nor shall we,
wait and watch we never so long. No sound of their

183
TIME AND CHANGE

hammers or picks or shovels or of the dynamite ever
breaks the stillness of the air.

I have to believe that the valleys and mountains
of my native Catskills were carved out of a great
elevated plain or plateau; there is no other explan-
ation of them. Here lie the level strata, without any
bending or folding, or sign of convulsion and up-
heavals, horizontal as the surface of the sea or lake
in which their sediments were originally laid down;
and here are these deep, wide valleys cut down
through these many sheets of stratified rock; and
here are these long, high, broad-backed mountains,
made up of the rock that the forces of air and water
have left, and with no forces of erosion at work
that would appreciably alter a line of the landscape
in ten thousand years; and yet we know, if we know
anything about the physical history of the earth,
that erosion has done this work, carved out these
mountains and valleys, from the Devonian strata,
as literally as the sculptor carves his statue from the
block of marble.

Above my lodge on the home farm the vast lay-
ers of the gray, thin-sheeted Catskill rock crop out
and look across the valley to their fellows two or
more miles away where they crop out in a similar
manner on the opposite slope of the mountain.
With the eye of faith I see the great sheets restored,
and follow them across on the line which they made
zeons ago, till they are joined again to their fellows

184
SCIENTIFIC FAITH

as they were before the agents of erosion had so
widely severed them.

These physical forces have worked as slowly and
silently in sculpturing the landscapes as the biolo-
gical laws have worked in evolving man from the
lower animals, or the vertebrates from the inverte-
brates. The rains, the dews, the snows, the winds
— how could these soft, gently careering agents have
demolished these rocks and dug these valleys? One
would almost as soon expect the wings and feet of
the birds to wear away the forests they flit through.
The wings of time are feathered also, and as they
brush against the granite or the flinty sandstone no
visible particle is removed while you watch and
wait. Come back in athousand years, and you note
no change, save in the covering of trees and verdure.
Return in ten thousand, and you would probably
find the hills carrying their heads as high and as
proudly as ever. Here and there the face of the cliff
may have given way, or a talus slid into the valley,
or a stream or river changed its course, or sawed
deeper into the rock, and a lake been turned into a
marsh, or the delta of a river broadened — minor
changes, such as a shingle from your roof or a brick
from your chimney, while your house stands as be-
fore. In one hundred thousand years what changes
should we probably find? Here in the Catskills,
where I write, the weathering of the hills and moun-
tains would probably have been but slight. It must

185
TIME AND CHANGE

be fifty thousand years or more since the great ice-
sheet left us. Where protected by a thin coat of soil,
its scratches and grooves upon the surface rock are
about as fresh and distinct as you may see them
made in Alaska at the present time. Where the
rock is exposed, they have weathered out, one eighth
of an inch probably having been worn away. The
drifting of the withered leaves of autumn, or of the
snows of winter over them, it really seems, would
have done as much in that stretch of time. Then try
to fancy the eternity it has taken the subaerial ele-
ments to cut thousands of feet through this hard
Catskill sandstone! No, the evolution of the land-
scape, the evolution of the animal and vegetable
kingdoms, the evolution of the suns and planets,
involve a process so slow, and on such a scale, that
it is quite unthinkable. How long it took evolution
to bridge the chasm between the vertebrate and the
invertebrate, between the fish and the frog, between
the frog and the reptile, between the reptile and the
mammal, or between the lowest mammal and the
highest, who can guess?

But the gulf has been passed, and here we are in
this teeming world of life and beauty, with a terrible
past behind us, but a brighter and brighter future
before us.
x
“THE WORM STRIVING TO BE MAN”

HEN our minds have expanded sufficiently
to take in and accept the theory of evo-
lution, with what different feelings we look upon
the visible universe from those with which our fa-
thers looked upon it! Evolution makes the universe
alive. In its light we see that mysterious potency
of matter itself, that something in the clod under
foot that justifies Emerson’s audacious line of the
“worm striving to be man.” We are no longer the
adopted children of the earth, but her own real off-
spring. Evolution puts astronomy and geology in
our blood and authefticates us and gives us the
backing of the whole solar system. This is the re-
demption of the earth: it is the spiritualization of
matter.

In imagination stand off in vacant space and see
the earth rolling by you, a huge bubble with all its
continents and seas and changing seasons and count-
less forms of life upon it, and remember that you are
looking upon a great cosmic organism, pulsing with
the vital currents of the universe, and that what
it holds of living forms were not arbitrarily imposed

187
TIME AND CHANGE

upon it from without, but vitally evolved from
within and that man himself is one of its products
as literally as are the trees that stand rooted to the
soil. Revert to the time when life was not, when the
globe was a half-incandescent ball, or when it was a
seething, weltering waste of heated water, before
the land had yet emerged from the waves, and yet
you and I were there in the latent potencies of the
chemically and dynamically warring elements. We
were there, the same as the heat and flame are in the
coal and wood and as the explosive force of powder
is in the grains. The creative cosmic chemistry in
due time brought us forth, and started us on the long
road that led from the amceba up to man. There
have been no days of creation. Creation has been a
continuous process, and the creator has been this
principle of evolution inherent in all matter.

Man himself was born of this principle. His
genealogy finally runs back to the clod under his
feet. One has no trouble in accepting the old Bibli-
cal account of his origin from the dust of the earth
when one views that dust in the light of modern
science.

Man is undoubtedly of animal origin. He is em-
. braced in the same zodlogical scheme as are all other
creatures, and did not start as man any more than
you and [I started with our present stature, or than
the earth sprang from chaos as we now behold it.

His complete physical evolution must have been

188
THE WORM STRIVING TO BE MAN

achieved thousands of centuries ago, but his full
mental and spiritual evolution is not yet.

I think of his physical evolution as completed
when he assumed the upright attitude or passed
from a quadruped to a biped, which must of itself
have been a long, slow process. Probably our whole
historic period would form but a fraction of this
cycle of unrecorded time. Man’s complete emer-
gence from the lower orders, so that he stood off in
sharp contrast tothem in his physical form probably
occurred in later Tertiary times, and what the mean-
ing of this stretch of time is in human years we can
only conjecture. During this cycle of numberless
millenniums till the dawn of history, man’s develop-
ment was mainly mental. He left the brute crea-
ture behind because his mind continued to develop
after his physical form was complete, while the brute
stood still. Whence the impulse that sent man for-
ward? Why was one animal form endowed with the
capacity for endless growth and development, and
all the others denied it? Ah! that is the question of
questions. Compared with the development of his
bodily powers, man’s mental and spiritual growth
has been very rapid. He seems to have been mil-
lions of years in getting his body, while he has been
only millenniums in getting his reason and intelli-
gence. What progress since the dawn of history!
Compare the Germans of the time of Tacitus, or the
Gauls of the time of Cesar, or the Britons of the

"189
TIME AND CHANGE

time of Hadrian with the people of those countries
to-day.

We are prone to speak of man’s emergence from
the lower orders as if it Were a simple thing, almost
like the going from one country into another. But
try to think what it means; try to think of the slow
transformation, of the long, toilsome road even
from the halfway house of our simian ancestors.
If we do not give him the benefit of the sudden
mutation theory of the origin of species, then think
of the slow process, hair by hair, as it were, by which
a tailed, apelike arboreal animal was transformed
into a hairless, tailless, erect, tool-using, fire-using,
speech-forming animal. We see in our own day in
the case of the African negro, that centuries of our
Northern climate have hardly any appreciable effect
toward making a white man of him; nor, on the other
hand, has exposure to the tropical sun had much
more effect in making a negro of the white man.
Probably it would take ten thousand years or more
of these conditions to bleach the pigments out of the
one skin and put them in the other. There is con-
vinecing proof from painting and figures found in
Egypt that neither the African negro nor the
Egyptian has changed in features in five thousand
years.

The most marvelous thing about man’s evolu-
tion is the inborn upward impulse in some one low
organism that rested not till it reached its goal in

190
THE WORM STRIVING TO BE MAN

him. The mollusk remains, but some impulse went
out from the mollusk that begat the fish. The fish
remains, but some impulse went out from the fish
that begat the amphibian. The amphibian remains,
but some impulse went out from the amphibian that
begat the reptile. The reptile remains, but some
impulse went out from the reptile that begat the
mammal; and so on up to man. Man must have had
a specific line of descent. One golden thread must
connect him with the lowest forms of life. And the
wonder is that this golden thread was never snapped
or lost through all the terrible vicissitudes of the geo-
logic ages. But I suppose it is just as great a wonder
that the line of descent of the horse, or the sheep, or
the dog, or the bird, was not snapped or lost. Some
impulse or tendency was latent or potential in the
first unicellular life that rested not till it eventuated
in each of these higher forms. Did any terrestrial or
celestial calamity endanger the line of descent of
any of the higher creatures? Was any form cut off
in the world-wide crustal disturbances of the earth
at the end of palseozoic and mesozoic time, when so
many forms of animal life appear to have been
wiped out, that might in time have given birth to a
kind unlike or superior to any now upon the earth?
Species after species have become extinct, whole
orders and families have gone out, often rather sud-
denly. Why we know not. Why the line of man’s
descent was not cut off, who knows? It is a vain
191
TIME AND CHANGE

speculation. There can be little doubt that in early
Tertiary times our ancestor was a small, feeble
mammal, maybe of the lemur, maybe of the mar-
supial kind, powerless before the great carnivorous
mammals of that time, and probably escaping them
by his greater agility, perhaps by his arboreal habits.
The ancestor of the horse was also a small creature
at that time, not larger than a fox. It was not cut
off; the line of descent seems complete to the horse
of our day. Small beginnings seem to be the rule in
all provinces of life. There is little doubt that the
great animals of our day — the elephant, the whale,
the lion, —all had their start in small forms. Many
of these small forms have been found.’ But a com-
plete series of any of the animal forms that eventu-
ated in any of the dominant species is yet wanting.
It is quite certain that the huge, the gigantic, the
monstrous in animal, as in vegetable life, lies far be-
hind us. Is it not quite certain that evolution in the
life of the globe has run its course, and that it will
not again bring forth reptiles or mammals of the
terrible proportions of those of past geologic ages?
nor ferns, nor mosses, nor as gigantic trees as those
of Carboniferous times? Probably the redwoods of
the Far West, the gigantic sequoias, are the last race
of gigantic trees. The tide of life of the globe is un-
doubtedly at the full. The flood has no doubt been
checked many times. The glacial periods, of which
there seem to have been several in different parts
192
THE WORM STRIVING TO BE MAN

of the earth, and in different geological periods, no
doubt checked it when it occurred. But the tide as a
whole must have steadily risen, because the progres-
sion from lower to higher forms has gone steadily
forward. The lower forms have come along; Nature
has left nothing behind. The radiates, the articu-
lates, the mollusca, are still with us, but in the
midst of these the higher and higher forms have
been constantly appearing. The great biological
tree has got its growth. Many branches and twigs
have died and dropped off, and many more will do
so, are doing so before our eyes, but I cannot help
doubting that any new branches of importance are
yet to appear — any new families or orders of birds,
or fishes, or reptiles, or mammals. The horse, the
stag, the sheep, the dog, the cat, as we know them,
are doubtless the end of the series. One arrives at
this conclusion upon general principles. Life as a
whole must run its course or reach its high-water
mark, the same as life in its particular phases. Man
has arrived and has universal dominion; all things
are put under his feet. The destiny of life upon the
globe is henceforth largely in his hands. Not even
he can avert the final cosmic catastrophe which
physicists foresee, and which, according to Pro-
fessor Lowell, the beings upon Mars are now strug-
gling to ward off.

Man has taken his chances in the clash of forces
of the physical universe. No favor has been shown

193
TIME AND CHANGE

him, or is shown him to-day, and yet he has come
to his estate. He has never been coddled; fire, water,
frost, gravity, hunger, death, have made and still
make no exceptions in his favor. He is on a level
with all other animals in this respect. He has his life
and well-being on the same terms as do the fowls of
the air and the beasts of the fields.

Archbishop Whately thought that primitive man
could never have raised himself to a higher con-
dition without external aid— some “elementary
instruction to enable his faculties to begin their
work.” He must have had a boost. Well, the boost
was forthcoming, but it was not from without, but
from within, through this principle of development,
this upward striving that was innate from the first
in certain forms of life and of which Whately had
no conception. It was the conception of his time
that creation was like a watch made and wound up
by some power external to itself.

The physical evolution of man, as I have said,
is no doubt complete. He will never have wings, or
more legs, or longer arms, or a bigger brain. The
wings and the extra legs and the keener sense he has
left behind him. His development henceforth must
be in the mental and spiritual. He is bound to have
more and more dominion over Nature, and see more
and more clearly his own relation to her. He will
in time completely subdue and possess the earth.
Yes, and probably exhaust her? But he will see in

194 :
THE WORM STRIVING TO BE MAN

time that he is squandering his inheritance and will
mend his ways. He will conserve in the future as he
has wasted in the past. He will learn to conserve
his own health. He will banish disease; he will
stamp out all the plagues and scourges, through his
scientific knowledge; he will double or treble the
length of life. Man has undoubtedly passed through
and finished certain phases of his emotional and
mental development. He will never again be the
religious enthusiast and fanatic he has been in the
past; he has not worshiped his last, but he has
worshiped his best. He will build no more cathe-
drals; he will burn no more martyrs at the stake.
His religion as such is on the wane. But his humani-
tarianism is a rising tide. He is becoming less and
less a savage, revolts more and more at the sight of
blood and suffering. The highly religious ages were
ages of blood and persecution. Man’s tenderness for
man has vastly increased. The sense of the sacred-
ness of human life has increased as his faith in his
gods has declined. He has grown more human as he
has grown less superstitious. Science has atrophied
his faith, but it has softened his heart. His fear of
Nature has given place to love. Man never loved as
he does now. He has withdrawn his gaze from hea-
ven and fixed it upon the earth. As his interest in
other worlds has diminished, his interest in this has
increased. As the angels have departed, the child-
ren have come in.
195
TIME AND CHANGE

When the nations, too, cease to be savage and
selfish, and become altruistic, then the new birth of
humanity will actually have occurred. As an artist
and a creator of beautiful forms, man has also had
his day; he loved the beautiful, the artistic, or the
ornamental long before he loved the true and the
just. He was proud before he was kind; he was chiy-
alrous before he was decent; he was tattooed before
he was washed; he was painted before he was
clothed; he built temples before he built a home;
he sacrificed to his gods before he helped his neigh-
bor; he was heroic before he was self-denying; he
was devout before he was charitable. We are losing
the savage virtues and vanities and growing in the
grace of all the humanities, and this process will
doubtless go on, with many interruptions and set-
backs of course, till the kingdom of love is at last
fairly established upon the earth.
XI
THE PHANTOMS BEHIND US

I

’ TAKE the title of this paper from those great
lines in Whitman beginning —
“ Rise after rise bow the phantoms behind me” —

in which he launches in vivid imaginative form

the whole doctrine of evolution some years before

Darwin had published his epoch-making work on

the “Origin of Species.”

“ T see afar down the huge first Nothing, and I knowI was even
there.”

I do not know that Whitman had any concrete
belief in the truth of the animal origin of man. He
read as picture and parable that which the man of
‘science reads as demonstrable fact. He saw and felt
the great truth of evolution, but he saw it as written
in his own heart and not in the great stone book of
the earth, and he saw it written large. He felt its
cosmic truth, its truth in relation to the whole
scheme of things; he felt his own kinship with all
that lives, and had a vivid personal sense of his debt
to the past, not only of human history, but also to
the past of the earth and the spheres. And he felt
this as a poet and not as a man of science.

197
TIME AND CHANGE

The theory of evolution as applied to the whole
universe and its inevitable corollary, the animal
origin of man, is now well established in most of the
leading minds of the world, but it is still rejected by
many timid and sensitive souls, and it will be a long
time before it becomes universally accepted.

Doubtless one source of the trouble we have in
accepting the theory comes from the fact that our
minds have not been used to such thoughts; in the
mind of the race they are a new thing: they are not
in the literature nor in the philosophy nor in the
sacred books in which our minds have been nurtured;
they are of yesterday; they came to us raw and un-
hallowed by the usage of ages; more than that, they
savor of the materialism of all modern science,
which is so distasteful to our finer ideals and religious
sensibilities. In fact, these ideas are strangers of an
alien race in our intellectual household, and we look
upon them coldly and distrustfully. But probably
to our children, or to our children’s children, they will
wear quite a different countenance; they will have
become an accepted part of the great family of ideas
of the race.

Another hindrance is the dullness and opacity of
our own minds. We are slow to wake up to a sense
of the divinity that hedges us about. The great
office of science has been to show us this universe as
much more wonderful and divine than we have been
wont to believe; shot through and through with celes-

198
THE PHANTOMS BEHIND US

tial laws and forces; matter, indeed, but matter in-
formed with spirit and intelligence; the creative
energy inherent and active in the ground underfoot
not less than in the stars and nebule overhead.

We look for the divine afar off. We gaze upon the
beauty and purity of the heavenly bodies without
thinking that we are also in the heavens. We must
open our minds to the stupendous fact that God is
immanent in his universe and that it is literally and
exactly true, as we were taught long ago, that, during
every moment of our lives, in Him we live and move
and have our being.

Moreover, we are staggered by the element of vast
time that is implied in the history of development.
Were it not for the records in the rocks, we could not
believe it at all. All the grand movements and pro-
cesses of nature are quite beyond our ken. In the
heavens only the astronomer with his prisms and
telescopes traces them; only the geologist and pale-
ontologist read their history in the earth’s crust.
The soil we cultivate was once solid rock, but not
in one lifetime, not in many lifetimes, do we see the
transformation of the rocks into soil. Nations may
rise and fall, and the rocks they looked upon and the
soil they tilled remain practically unchanged. Geo-
logists talk about the ancient continents that have
passed away. What an abyss of time such things
open! They talk about the birth of a mountain or
the decay of a mountain as we talk of the birth

199
TIME AND CHANGE

and death of a man, but in doing so they reckon
with periods of time for which we have no standards
of measurement. They walk and talk with the
Eternal. To us the mountains seem as fixed as the
stars. But the stars, too, are flitting. Look at Orion
some millions of years hence, and he will have been
torn limb from limb. The combination of stars that
forms that striking constellation and all other con-
stellations is temporary asthe grouping of theclouds.
The rise of man from the lower orders implies a scale
of time almost as great. It is unintelligible to us be-
cause it belongs to a category of facts that tran-
scends our experience and the experience of the race
astheinterstellar spaces transcend our earthly meas-
urements.

We now gaze upon the order below us across an
impassable gulf, but that gulf we have crossed and
without any supernatural means of transportation.
We may say it has been bridged or filled with the
humble ancestral forms that carried forward the
precious evolutionary impulse of the vertebrate
series till it culminated in man. All vestiges of that
living bridge are now gone, and the legend of our
crossing seems like a dream or a miracle. Biological
evolution has gone hand in hand with geological
evolution, and both are on a scale of time of which
our hour-glass of the centuries gives us but a faint
hint. Our notions of time are not formed on the
pattern of the cosmic processes, or the geologic

200
THE PHANTOMS BEHIND US

processes, or the evolutionary processes; they are
formed on the pattern of our own brief span of life.
In a few cases in the familiar life about us we see the
evolutionary process abridged, and transformations
like those of unrecorded time take place before our
eyes, as when the tadpole becomes the frog or the
grub becomes the butterfly. These rapid changes
are analogous to those which in the depths of geo-
logic time have evolved the bird from the fish or the
reptile, or the seal and the manatee from a four-
footed land animal. Our common bluebird has long
been recognized as a descendant of thethrushfamily;
this origin is evident in the speckled breast of the
young birds and in the voices of the mature birds.
I have heard a bluebird with an unmistakable thrush
note. The transformation has doubtless been so
slow that an analogous change taking place in any
of the bird forms of our own time would entirely
escape observation. The bluebird may have been
as long in getting his blue coat as man has been in
getting his upright position.

Looking into the laws and processes of the com-
mon nature about us for clues to the origin of man
is not unlike looking into the records of the phono-
graph for the secret of the music which that won-
derful instrument voices for us. Something, some
active principle or agent, has to invoke the music
that slumbers or is latent in these lines.

In like manner some principle or force that we

201
TIME AND CHANGE

do not see is active in the ground underfoot and in
the forms of life about us which is the final secret of
the origin of man and of all other creatures. This
something is the evolutionary impulse, this innate
aspiration of living matter to reach higher and
higher forms. “Urge and urge,” says Whitman,
“always the procreant urge of the world.” It is in
Emerson’s worm “striving to be man.” This “striv-
ing” pervades organic nature. Whence its origin
science does not assume to say.!

Then the difference in kind between the mind of
man and that of the lower orders makes evolution
a doubly hard problem.

Look over the globe and see what a gulf separates
man from all other creatures. All the other animals
seem akin — as if the product of the same workman.
Man, in contrast, seems like an introduction from
some other sphere or the outcome of quite other
psychological laws; his dominion over them all is
so complete and universal. Without their special-
ization of structure or powers, he yet masters them
all and uses them; without their powers of speed,
he yet outstrips them; without their strength of
tusk and limb, he yet subdues them; without their
inerrant instinct, he yet outwits them; without their
keenness of eye, ear, and nose, he yet wins in the

1 This passage was written long before I had read Bergson’s
Creative Evolution, as were several others of the same import in
this volume.

202
THE PHANTOMS BEHIND US

chase; without their special adaptation to environ-
ment, he survives when they perish. A man is
marked off from the animals below him, I say, as if
he were a being of another sphere. He looks into
their eyes and they into his, and no recognition
passes; and yet we have to believe that he and they
are fruit of the same biologic tree and that their
stem forms unite in the same trunk somewhere in
the abyss of biologic time.

The rise of man from the lower orders taxes our
powers of belief and our faith in the divinity that
lurks underfoot far more than did the special crea-
tion myth. Creation by omnipotent fiat seems easy
when you have the omnipotent being to begin with,
but creation through evolution is a kind of cosmic
or biologic legerdemain that baffles and bewilders
us. It so far transcends all our earthly’ knowledge
and experience and all the flights of our philosophy
that we stand speechless before it. It opens a gulf
that the imagination cannot clear; it opens vistas
from which we instinctively shrink; it opens up
abysms of time in which our whole historic period
would be but a day; it opens up a world of struggle,
delay, waste, failure that palls the imagination. It
challenges our faith in the immanency and in the
ceaseless activity of God in his world; it brings the
creative energy down from its celestial abode and
clothes it with the flesh and blood of animal life.
It may chill and shock us; it shows us that we are

203
TIME AND CHANGE

of the earth earthy; yea, that we are of the animal
beastly; it presses us down in matter; it puts out the
lights to which we have so long turned as lighting
our origin; the words “‘sacred,”’ “divine,” “holy,”
and “celestial,’’ as applied to our origin and devel-
opment, we have no longer any use for, nor for any
words or ideas that set us apart from the rest of
creation — above it in our origin or apart from it in
our relations. The atmosphere of mystery and mir-
acle and sanctity that our religious training has
thrown around our introduction upon this planet
and around our relations and destiny science dispels.
Our language and many of our ideas and habits of
thought date back to pre-scientific times — when
there were two worlds, the heavenly and the earthly,
separated by a gulf. Now we know that the two
worlds are one, that they are inseparably blended;
that the celestial and the terrestrial are under the
same law; that we can never be any more in the hea-
vens than we are here and now, nor any nearer the
final sources of life and power; that the divine is
underfoot as well as overhead; that we are part and
parcel of the physical universe, and take our chances
in the cosmic processes the same as the rest, and
draw upon the same fund of animal life that the
other creatures do. We are identified with the
worm underfoot no less than with the stars over-
head. We are not degraded by such a thought, but
the whole of creation is lifted up. Our minds and
204
THE PHANTOMS BEHIND US

bodies are not less divine, but all things are more
divine. We have to gird up our loins and try to
summon strength to see this tremendous universe
as it is, alive and divine to the last particle and em-
bosomed in the Infinite.

ani

Evolution is not the final explanation of the uni-
verse, but it is probably the largest generalization
of the modern mind. Science has to start some-
where, and it starts with the universe as it finds it
and seeks to trace secondary or proximate causes;
the evolutionist seeks to trace the footsteps of cre-
ative energy in the world of animal life. How did
God make man? Out of the dust of the earth, says
the Bible of our fathers. The evolutionist teaches
essentially the same thing, only he does not abridge
the process as the catechism has abridged it for us;
he would fain unfold the whole long road that man
has traveled from the first protozoic cell to the vast
communities of cells that now make up his physical
life. He would show how man has risen on stepping-
stones of his dead self. These stepping-stones have
been the animal forms below him. In them and
through them something, some impulse, some force,
has mounted and mounted through all the enormous
lapse of geologic time. In imagination we see the
dim, shadowy man, restless and struggling in a vast
number of earlier forms. He has struggled up-

205
TIME AND CHANGE

ward through the invertebrates, through the fish,
through the reptile, through the lower mammals,
through his simian ancestors till he reaches his goal
in the man we know.

Darwin was not the author of the theory of evolu-
tion, but he made the theory alive and real to the
imagination. He showed us what a master key it is
for unlocking the riddle of the life of the globe.
He launched biological science upon a new career
and made it worthy of its place in the great trilogy
of sciences, astronomy, geology, and biology, of
which Tennyson, in his poem “Parnassus,” recog-
nized only the first two. Had Tennyson written his
poem in our day he would undoubtedly have in-
cluded biology among his “‘terrible Muses” that
tower above all others, eclipsing the glory of the
great poets. Or is it true that we find it easier to
accept the theory of the evolution of the worlds and
suns from nebulous matter than to accept the theory
of the evolution of man from the maze of the lower
animal forms? It is less personal tous. The astro-
nomer has the advantage of the biologist in one im-
portant respect: he can show us in the heavens now
the process of the evolution of worlds actually
going on, but the biologist cannot show us the trans-
formation of one species into another taking place
to-day. We can sound the abysses of astronomic
space easier than we can sound the abysses of geo-
logic time. The stars and the nebulze we have

206
THE PHANTOMS BEHIND US

always with us, but where are the myriad earlier
forms that were the antecedents of the present animal
life of the globe? True, the paleontologist finds a
more or less disjointed record of them in the strati-
fied rocks and sees in a measure the course evolu-
tion has taken, but he does not actually see it at
work as does the astronomer. More than that, the
forces the astronomer deals with are mechanical
and chemical, but the biologist deals with a new
force called life that often reverses or defies me-
chanical and chemical forces, but which is yet so
identified and blended with them that we cannot
conceive it apart from them. The stomach does not
digest itself, nor gravity hold the blood in the lower
extremities. The tree lifts up its weight of fluids
and solids and holds aloft its fruit and foliage in
spite of gravity; its growing roots split and lift the
rocks; mosses and lichens disintegrate granite; vital
energy triumphs over chemical and mechanical
energy.

Biological laws are much more subtle and difficult
to trace and formulate than chemical and mechani-
cal laws. Hence the student of organic evolution
can rarely arrive at the demonstrable certainties in
this field that he can in the sphere of chemistry and
mechanics. It is very doubtful if life can ever be -
explained in terms of these things. Life works
through chemical combinations and affinities, and
yet is it not more than chemistry? It works with

207
TIME AND CHANGE

and through mechanical principles and forces, and
yet it is evidently more than mechanics. It is mani-
fested through matter, and yet no analysis of matter
can reveal its secret. It comes and goes while mat-
ter stays; we destroy life, but cannot destroy mat-
ter. It is as fugitive as the wind which fills all sails
one minute and is gone the next. It avails itself of
fluids and gases and the laws which govern them,
but fluids and gases do not explain it. It waits
upon the rains and the dews, but it is more than
they are; it follows in the footsteps of the decay and
disintegration of the inorganic, and yet it is not the
gift of these things; it transforms the face of the
earth, and yet the earth has been and will be when
it was not and when it will not be. Through his
knowledge and his science man performs wonders
every day; he can reduce mountains to powder and
seas to dry land, but he cannot create or start de novo
the least throb of life. At least, he has not yet done
so. With all his vast resources of mechanics and
chemistry, and his insight into the mechanism of
the universe, he has not yet made the least particle
of inorganic matter thrill with the mysterious some-
thing we call life.

There must have been a time when life was not
upon the earth and there must again come a time
when it will not be. It has probably vanished from
the moon and all inferior planets, and it has not
yet come to the superior planets, except maybe to

208
THE PHANTOMS BEHIND US

Mars. It must be and must have always been po-
‘tential in matter, but this fact leaves the mystery
as profound as ever.

Yet if the artificial production of life were to
happen to-day — if in some of our laboratories liv-
ing matter were produced from non-living, should
we not still have to credit the event to some mysteri-
ous potency residing in matter itself? If by a lucky
stroke man were to evoke the organic from the inor-
ganic, be assured he would not evoke something
from nothing, or add anything to the latent possi-
bilities of the elements with which he works. Does
not the question still remain who or what made this
feat possible? One dare affirm that man cannot cre-
ate life de novo any more than he can create matter.
He may yet evoke life as he evokes the spark from
the flint and the flame from the match or as he
evokes force from the food heeats. In this latter case
he does not create the force; he liberates it through
the vital forces of his body. Thespark from the flint
and the flame from the match were called forth by a
mechanical process, but the process was set going
by the will which waits upon the vital process. The
body with all its many functions is a complicated
system of mechanical devices and chemical pro-

__ cesses, but that which is back of all and governs all
is not mechanical; the body is a machine plus some-
thing else.
The chemist or biologist who shall produce a
209
TIME AND CHANGE

speck of protoplasm to-day will have the credit of
unlocking a power in inorganic nature; he will prove
by a short cut how immanent the creative energy
or the vital force of the universe is in matter. He
will not have eliminated the creative energy; he will
only have disclosed it and availed himself of it.

We behold spontaneous combustion, a fire self-
kindled, but we do not see the activity of the par-
ticles of matter that preceded it or penetrate the
secret of their mysterious affinities. The fire was
potential there in the very constitution of the ele-
ments. We flout at miracles, and then we disclose
an unending miracle in the life about us.

All the life upon the globe, including man with all
his marvelous powers, surely originated upon the
globe, surely arose out of the non-living and the non-
thinking, not by the fiat of some power external to
nature, but through the creative energy inherent
in nature and ever active there. The great physical
instrumentality was heat — without heat the reac-
tion called life could never have taken place. This
fact has led a French biologist to say that life is only
a surface accident in the history of the thermic
evolution of the globe. Without the disintegration
of the rocks and the formation of the soil and the
precipitation of watery vapor, which was indirectly
the work of heat, the vegetable and the animal could
not have developed. If we succeed in proving that
all these things are of chemico-mechanical origin,

210
THE PHANTOMS BEHIND US

we still want to know who or what instituted these
chemical and mechanical powers and the laws that
govern them. Creation by chemistry and mechanics
is as mysterious as creation by miracle. We must
still have a creator, while we can do nothing with
him nor find any place for him in an endless, begin-
ningless, infinite series of events. So there we are.
We go out of the same door by which we came in.

When all life vanishes from the earth, as it will
when the condition of heat and moisture has radi-
cally changed, and eternal refrigeration sets in —
what then? The potencies of matter will not have
changed and life will reappear and go through its
cycle again on some other sphere.

Life began upon this earth not by miracle in the
old sense, but by miracle in the new scientific sense
— by the immanence and ceaseless activity of the
creative energy in the physical world about us—
in the sunbeam, in the rains, in the snows, in the air
currents, and in the soil underfoot; in oxygen, hy-
drogen, carbon, nitrogen, in lime, iron, silex, phos-
phorus, and in all the rest of them. Each has its
laws, its ways, its fixed mode of procedure, its
affinities, its likes and dislikes, and life is bound up
with all of them. ,If we hypothesize the ether to
explain certain phenomena, why should we not
hypothesize a vital force to account for other mys-
teries?

The inorganic passes into the organic as night

Q11
  

TIME AND CHANGE

passes into day. Where does one end and the other
begin? No man can tell. There is no beginning and
no ending of either, and yet night comes and goes
and day comes and goes — a constant becoming and
a constant ending. We are probably in the midday
of the life of the globe — life huge and rank and
riotous — the youth of life has passed, life more se-
date and aspiring and spiritual has come. The gi-
gantic has gone or is going, the huge monsters of the
sea, and of the land have had their day, man appears
at the end of the series of lesser but more complete
forms.
mI

Many intelligent persons who have been rocked
in the cradle of the old creeds still look upon evolu-
tion as a godless doctrine and accuse it of vulgariz-
ing high and sacred things. This state of mind can
only be slowly outgrown by familiarizing ourselves
with the processes of nature or of the creative en-
ergy in the world of life and matter about us; with
our own origin in the low fishlike or apelike creature
in the maternal womb; with the development of
every plant, tree, and animal from a microscopic
germ; with the unbroken sequence of natural law;
with the waste, the delays, the pains, the failures
on every hand; with the impersonal and the impar-
tial character of all the physical forces; with the
transformations and metamorphoses that marked
the course of animal life; and, above all, with the

212
THE PHANTOMS BEHIND US

thought that evolution is not self-caused or in any
true sense a cause in itself, but the instrument or
plan of the power that works in and through all
things. The ways of God in all these details are
past finding out, but science watches the unfolding
of a bud, the development of a grain of wheat, the
growth of the human embryo, the succession of life-
forms upon the globe as revealed in the records of
the stratified rocks, or observes in the heavens the
condensation of nebulous matter into suns and
systems, and it says this is one of his ways. Evo-
lution — an endless unfolding and transformation.
“Urge and urge and urge,” says Whitman (I love
to repeat this saying; it is so significant), “always
the procreant urge of the world.” Always the labor
and travail pains of the universe to bring forth
higher forms; always struggle and pain and failure
and death, but always a new birth and an upward
reach.

Strike out the element of time and we see evolu-
tion as the great prestidigitator of the biologic ages.
The creative energy manipulates a fish and it turns
into a reptile; it covers a mollusk as with a vapor
and behold, a backboned creature instead! Now
we see a little creature no larger than a fox and
when we look again, behold the horse; a wolf or
some kindred animal is plunged into the water, and
behold, the seal! Some small creature of the lemur
kind is covered with a capacious hand, and we look

213
TIME AND CHANGE

again, and behold man! We have only to minimize
time and minimize space to see the impossible hap-
pening all about us or to see the Mosaic account of
creation repeated; we have only the clay and water
to begin with, when, presto! behold what we have
now! We see the rocks covered with verdure, the
mountains vanishing into plains, the valleys chang-
ing into hills or the plains changing into moun-
tains, tropic lands covered with ice and snow.

Lord Salisbury thought he had discredited natu-
ral selection, which is one of the feet upon which
evolution goes, when he charged that no one had
ever seen it at work. We have not seen it at work
because our little span of life is too short. Only the
paleontologist traces in the records of the rocks the
footsteps of this god of change. And rarely if ever
does he find’ a continuous and complete record —
only a footprint here and there, but he sees the
direction in which they are going and many of the
places where the traveler tarried. The palontolo-
gist, that detective of the rocks, works up his case
with the same thoroughness and caution and the
same power of observation as does the detective in
human affairs and with a greater sweep of scientific
imagination.

An agent of evolution is the influence of the en-
vironment, but who sees the environment set its
stamp upon animal life? Aftermany generations we
may see the accumulated résults. In a few in-

Q14
THE PHANTOMS BEHIND US

stances the results are rapid. Thus sheep lose their
wool in tropical climates and a northern fur-bear-
ing animal its fur. The well-being of the animal de-
mands this change, and demands it quickly. Fish
lose their sense of sight in underground streams;
this loss is not so vital and it comes about much
more slowly. A tropical climate sets its stamp upon
the complexion and character of man, but this
again is a slow process, as the same stress of neces-
sity does not exist.

In the tendency to variation — in form, size, dis-
position, power, fertility — man differs from all
other animals. In the same race, in the same fam-
ily, we find infinitely varied types. Among the wild
creatures all the individuals of a species are prac-
tically alike. We can hardly tell one fox, or one
marmot, or one chipmunk, or one crow, or one
hawk, or one black duck from another of the same
species. Of course there are slight individual differ-
ences, but they are hardly distinguishable. Among
the insects, one bee, one beetle, one ant, one butter-
fly seems the exact copy of every other individual
of its kind. The law of variation seems practically
annulled in the insect world.

It is-the wide and free range of this law in the
human species that has undoubtedly led to the
great progress of the race. There has been no dead
level — no democracy of talent — no equality of
gifts, but only equality of opportunity. Men differ

215
TIME AND CHANGE

from one another in their mental endowments, capa-
cities, and dispositions vastly more than do any
other creatures upon the earth. This difference
makes man’s chances of progress so much the
greater; he has so many more stakes in the game.
If one type of talent fails, another type may win;
if the lymphatic temperament is not a success, try
the sanguine or the bilious; blue eyes and black eyes
and brown eyes will win more triumphs than blue
or black or brown alone. Arms or legs extra long,
sight or hearing extra sharp, wit extra keen, judg-
ment extra sure — all these things open doors to
more progress. Variation gives natural selection a
chance to take hold, and where the struggle for life
is the most severe the changes will be the most rapid
and the most radical. Without the pressure of the
environment natural selection would not select.
The tendency to physical variation in man is prob-
ably no greater than in other creatures, but his
tendency to mental variation is enormous. He
varies daily from mediocrity to genius, hence the
enormous range of his chances of progress. From
the first variation that started him on his way in
his line of descent, variation must have been more
and more active till he varied in the direction of
reason, long before the dawn of history, since which
time his progress has been by rapid strides — and
more and more rapid till we see his leaps forward in
recent times. The race owes its rapid progress to
216
THE PHANTOMS BEHIND US

its exceptional men, its men of genius and power,
and these have often been like sports or the sudden
result of mutations — a man like Lincoln springing
from the humblest parentage. No such extreme
variations are seen in any of the lower orders. In-
deed, in one’s lifetime one sees but very slight varia-
tion in any of the wild or domestic creatures, less
in the wild than in the domestic because they are
less under the influence of that most variable of ani-
mals, man. And man’s variations are mainly men-
tal and not physical. The higher we go in the scale
of powers, the greater the variation and hence the
more rapid thé evolution. Probably man’s body has
not changed radically in vast cycles of time, but
his mind has developed enormously since the dawn
of history.
Iv

Biologists are coming more and more to recognize
some unknown factor in evolution, probably some
unknowable factor. The four factors of Osborn —
heredity, ontogeny, environment, selection — play
upon and modify endlessly the new form when it is
started, but what about the original start? Whence
comes this inborn momentum, this evolutionary
send-off? What or who set the whole grand process
going?

Bergson sees an internal psychological principle
of development, hence the name of his book, “Crea-
tive Evolution.” Osborn uses the word “directed.”

Q17
TIME AND CHANGE

Certain characters, he says, are adaptive or suited
to their purpose from the start; they do not have
to be fitted to their place by natural selection.
Huxley uses the word “predestined” — all the life
of the globe and all the starry hosts of heaven are
working out in boundless space and in endless time
“their predestined course of evolution.” Darwin
must have had in mind the same mysterious some-
thing when he said that man had risen to the very
summit of the animal scale, but not through his own
exertions. Not by his own will or exertion, surely,
any more than the embryo in its mother’s womb
develops into the full-grown child by its own exer-
tion or than our temperaments and complexions
and statures are matters of our own wills and choice.
Something greater than man and before him, to
which he sustains the relation that the unborn child
sustains to its mother, must enter into our thought
of his origin and development.

The great evolutionists have been very cautious
about seeking to go behind evolution and name the
Primal Cause. In such an attempt science would at
once be beyond soundings. Darwin and Huxley
were reverent, truth-loving men, but they hesitated
as men of science to put themselves in a position
where no step could be taken.

Slowly man emerges out of the abyss of geologic
time into the dawn of history, and science gropes
about like a man feeling his way in the dark or, at

218
THE PHANTOMS BEHIND US

most, by the aid now and then of a dim flash of
light, to trace the path he has come. He has surely
arrived, and we are, I believe, safe in saying he has
come by the way of the lower orders; but the precise
forms through which he has come, the houses in
which he has tarried by the way, and all the adven-
tures and vicissitudes that befell him on the journey
— can we ever hope to know these things? In any
case, man has his antecedents; life has its anteced-
ents; every beat of one’s heart has its antecedent
cause, which again has its antecedent. We can thus
traverse the chain of causation only to find it is an
endless chain; the separate links we can examine,
but the first link or the last we see, by the very na-
ture of things, and the laws of our own minds, must
forever elude us. Science cannot admit of a break
in the chain of causation, cannot admit that miracles
or the supernatural in the old sense, as external and
arbitrary interference with the natural order, can
play or ever have played any part in this universe.
Yet science has to postulate a First Cause when it
knows, or metaphysics knows for it, that with the
Infinite there can be no first and no last, no begin-
ning and no ending, only endless succession.

To science man is not a fallen creature, but a
many times risen creature and all the good of the
universe centres in him. The mind that pervades
all nature and is active in plant and animal alike
first comes to know itself and regard itself and

219
TIME AND CHANGE

achieve intellectual appreciation in man. While
all nature below man is wise only to its own ends
and goes its appointed way as void of self-conscious-
ness as the stone that falls or the wind that blows,
the mind of man attains to disinterested wisdom
and turns upon itself and upon the universe the
power of objective thought; it alone achieves un-
derstanding.

In our studies of life and of the universe as soon
as we begin to bridge chasms by an appeal to the
miraculous, or to the extra-natural powers, we are
traitors to the scientific spirit which we seek to serve.
There are many things that science cannot explain.
Perhaps I may say that it cannot give the ultimate
explanation of anything. It can do little more than
tell us of the action, the interaction, and the reac-
tion of things, but of the things themselves, their
origin and ultimate nature, or the source of the laws
that govern them, what does it or what can it know?

Man is the heir of all the geologic ages; he inherits
the earth after countless generations of animals and
plants, and the beneficent forces of wind and rain,
air and sky, have in the course of millions of years
prepared it for him. His body has been built for
him through the lives and struggles of the countless
beings who are in the line of his long descent; his
mind is equally an accumulated inheritance of the
mental growth of the myriads of thinking men and
unthinking animals that went before him. In the

220
THE PHANTOMS BEHIND US

forms of his humbler forebears he has himself lived
and died myriads of times to make ready the soil
that nurses and sustains him to-day. He is a debtor
to Cambrian and Silurian times, to the dragons and
saurians and mastodons that have roamed over the
earth. Indeed, what is there or has there been in
the universe that he is not indebted to? The remot-
est star that shines has sent a ray that has entered
into his life. All things are under his feet, and the
keys of the heavens are in his hands.

Vv

One would fain arrive at some concrete belief or
image of his line of descent in geologic time as he
does in the historic period. But how hard it is to do
so! Can we form any mental picture of the actual
animal forms that the manward impulse has trav-
eled through? With all the light that paleontology
throws upon the animal life of the past, can we see
where amid the revel of these bizarre forms our an-
cestor hid himself? Can we see him as a reptile
in the slime of the jungle or in the waters of the
Mesozoic world? What was he like or what akin
to? What mark or sign was there upon him at that
time of the future that was before him? Can we see
him as a fish in the old Devonian seas or lakes? Was
he a big fish or a little fish? The primitive fishes
were mostly of the shark kind. Is there any con-
nection between that fact and the human sharks of

221
TIME AND CHANGE

to-day? Much less can one picture to one’s self
what his ancestor was like in the age of the inverte-
brates, amid the trilobites, etc., of the earlier Paleeo-
zoic seas. But we must go back even earlier than
that, back to unicellular life and to original proto-
plasm, and finally back to fiery nebulous matter.
What can we make of it all by way of concrete
conception of what actually took place — of the
visible, eating, warring, breeding animal forms in
whose safekeeping our heritage lay? Nothing. We
are not merely at sea, we are in abysmal depths,
and the darkness is so thick we can cut it.

We meet the same difficulty when we try to figure
to ourselves the line of descent of any of the animal
forms of to-day. How did they escape the world-
wild catastrophe of earlier geologic times? Or did
the creative impulse bank upon life as a whole and
never become bankrupt, no matter what special
lines or forms failed?

The first appearance of the primates is in Eocene
times and the anthropoid apes in the Miocene,
probably five millions of years ago. The form which
may have been in our line of descent, the Dryopithe-
cus, later appears to have become extinct. Did our
fate hang upon the success of any of these forms?
The monkeys and anthropoid apes appeared at the
same time in different countries. Nature seems to
have been making preliminary studies of man in
these various forms, but when and where she hit

222
THE PHANTOMS BEHIND US

upon the form that she perfected in man, who
knows ?

The horse appears to have been evolved in North
America, true cattle in Asia, elephants in Africa.
Can we narrow their line of descent down to a single
pair for each? Many forms allied to the horse ap-
peared in Europe and Asia in Miocene times. We
find monkeys in different parts of the world in the
same geologic horizons; did they all have a com-
mon origin?

Life’s apprenticeship has been a long one. The
earlier forms of vertebrate life were very large; later
they became very small. Nature seems to have ex-
perimented with bulk, as if she thought size would
win in the race. Hence those huge uncouth forms
among the reptiles and early mammals. The scheme
did not work well; bulk was not the thing, after all.
Most of the gigantic forms became extinct. Then
she tried smaller and more agile forms with larger
brains — less flesh and more wit. On this line Na-
ture continued to work till she produced her mas-
terpiece in man —a rather feeble and nearly wea-
ponless animal, but with an intangible armory of
weapons and tools in his brain that enables him
to put all creatures under his feet.
XII
THE HAZARDS OF THE PAST

I

ERGSON, the new French philosopher, thinks

we all had a narrow escape, back in geologic

time, of having our eggs spoiled before they were
hatched, or, rather, rendered incapable of hatching
by too thick a shell. This was owing to the voracity
of the early organisms. As they became more and
more mobile, they began to take on thick armors
and breastplates and shells and calcareous skins to
protect themselves from one another. This tend-
ency resulted, he thinks, in the arrest of the en-
tire animal world in its evolution toward higher
and higher forms. These shells and armors begat
a kind of torpor and immobility which has con-
tinued down to our day with the echinoderms
and mollusks, but the arthropods and vertebrates
escaped it by some lucky stroke. Now you and
I are here without imprisoning shells on our
backs; but how or why did we escape? Bergson does
not say. Was it a matter of luck or chance? Was
there ever a time when the stream of life tended to
harden and become fixed in its own forms like a
stream of cooling lava, or has the innate plasticity

225
TIME AND CHANGE

of life been easily equal to its own ends? True, the
clam remains a clam, and the starfish remains a
starfish; some other forms have carried the evo-
lutionary impulse forward till it flowered in man.
Was this impulse ever really checked or endan-
gered? Was the golden secret ever intrusted to
the keeping of any single form? and, had that form
been cut off, would the earth have been still with-
out its man? These are puzzling questions.
Thus, when we have come to look upon life and
nature in the light of evolution, what vistas are
opened to us where before were only blank walls!
The geologic ages take on a new interest to us. We
know that in some form we were even there. The
systems of sedimentary rocks which the geologist
portrays, piled one upon the other to a depth of
fifty miles or more, seem like the stairway by which
we have ascended, taking on some new and more
developed form at each rise. What we were at the
first step in Cambrian times only the Lord knows,
but whatever we were, we crept up or floated up
to the next rise. In the Silurian seas we may have
been a trilobite for aught we know; at any rate, we
were the outcome of the life impulse that begat the
trilobites, butour fate was not bound up with theirs,
as their race came to an end in those early geologic
ages, and our stem form did not. Whether or not
we were a fish in the Devonian seas, there is little
doubt that we had gills, because we have the gill-
226
THE HAZARDS OF THE PAST

slits yet in our early feetal life, and it is quite certain
that in some way weowe our backbones to the fishes.

When the rocks that form my native Catskills
were being laid down in the Devonian waters, I
fancy that my aquatic embryo was swimming about
somewhere and slowly waxing strong. Up and up I
climbed across the sandstone steps, across the lime-
stone, the conglomerate, the slate, up into Carbon-
iferous times. The upper and nether millstones of the
* millstone grit” did not crush me, neither did the
floods and the convulsions of Carboniferous times
that buried the vast vegetable growths that re-
sulted in our coal measures engulf or destroy me.
About that time probably, I emerged from the water
and became an amphibian, and maybe got my five
fingers and five toes on each side.

Nor did the wholesale destruction of animal life
at the end of Paleozoic time cut off my line of de-
scent. The monstrous reptiles of the succeeding or
Mesozoic age, the petrified remains of one of which
was recently found in the sandstone rocks near the
river’s edge under the Palisades of the Hudson, do
not seem to have endangered the golden thread by
which our fate hung. Still “I mount and mount.”
The stairs by which I climb were rent by earth-
quakes and volcanoes, the strata were squeezed up
and overturned and folded in the great mountain-
chains; the Alps, the Andes, the Himalayas, the
Coast Range were born; the earth-throes must have

Q27
TIME AND CHANGE

been tremendous at times; yet I escaped it all.
The huge and fearful mammals of the third or Ter-
tiary period passed me by unharmed. Eruptions
and cataclysms, the sinking of the land, the inun-
dations of the sea, world-wide deformations of the
earth’s crust, fire and ice and floods, monsters of the
deep and dragons of the land and the air have beset
my course from the first, and yet here I am, here we
all are, and apparently none the worse for the ap-
palling dangers we have passed through.

Evolution thus makes the world over for us. It
shows us in what a complex web of vital and far-
reaching relations we stand. It gives us an outlook
upon the past that is startling, and in some ways
forbidding, yet one that ought to be stimulating and
inspiring. If we look back with a shudder we should
look forward with a thrill. If the past is terrible,
the future is in the same degree cheering and invit-
ing. If we came out of those lowly and groveling
forms, to what heights of being may we not be carried
by the impetus that brought us thus far? In fact, to
what heights has it already carried us!

II

That the hazards of the past, to many forms of
life, at least, have been real and no myth, is evident
from the vast number of forms that have been cut
off and become extinct; various causes, now hard
to decipher, have worked together to the end, such

228
THE HAZARDS OF THE PAST

as changed geographical conditions, changes of cli-
mate, affecting the food-supply, extreme specializ-
ation, like that of the sabre-toothed tiger whose
petrified remains have been found in various parts
of this continent, and who apparently was finally
handicapped by his huge dental sabre. Probably
many more species of animals have become extinct
than have survived, but none of these could have
been in the line of man’s descent, else the human
race would not have been here. If the Eocene pro-
genitor of the horse, the little four-toed eohippus,
had been cut off, would not the world have been
horseless to-day? The horse in America became ex-
tinct, from some cause only conjectural, many tens
of thousands of years ago. Had the same fate be-
fallen the horse in Europe and Asia, it seems prob-
able that our civilization would have been far less
advanced to-day than it is.

The fate of every species of mammal in our time
seems to have been in the keeping of a single form
in early Tertiary times. The end of the Cretaceous
or chalk period saw the extinction of the giant rep-
tiles both of sea and of land, at the same time that
it saw the appearance of a great many species of
small and inconspicuous mammals, among which
doubtless were our own humble forebears. Extreme
specialization in any direction may narrow an an-
imal’s chances of survival; they have but one chance
in the game of life, whereas an animal with a more

229
TIME AND CHANGE

generalized organization has many chances. Man
is one of the most generalized of animals; no special
tools, no special weapons — his hand many tools and
weapons in one. Hence he is the most adaptable
of animals; all climes, all foods, all places are his; he
is master of the land, of the sea, of the air. '
Animal life is often curiously interdependent. I
asked our guide in the Adirondacks if there were
any ravens there. “Not nearly as many as there
used to be,” he said, and his explanation of their
disappearance seems thoroughly scientific; it was
that the wolves and the panthers kept them in meat,
and now that these animals had disappeared, the
ravens had little to feed upon. If the moose were
compelled to graze from off the ground, like a sheep
or a cow, the species would probably soon become
extinct. Osborn thinks it probable that the huge
beast called titanothere finally became extinct early
in Tertiary times owing to the form of its teeth,
which were of such a type that they could not
change to meet a change in the flora upon which the
creature fed. Of course we shall never know what
narrow escapes our race had from extinction in the
remote past; some forms have ended in a blind alley,
like the sea-urchin and the oyster. Arthropoda have
continued to evolve and have reached their high-
water mark of intelligence in bees and ants. The
vertebrates went forward and have culminated in
man. Bergson thinks that in the vertebrates intel-
230
THE HAZARDS OF THE PAST

ligence has been developed at the expense of in-
stinct, and that in the invertebrates instinct has
been perfected at the expense of intelligence.

Are we not compelled to adopt what is called the
monophyletic hypothesis, that is, that our line of
descent started from one pair, male and female,
somewhere in the vast stretch of geologic or biologic
time, and to reason that, had that pair been out of
the race, we should not have appeared?

Can we narrow life to a single point, a single cell,
in the past? Was there one and only one first bit of
protoplasm? If we were to say that life first ap-
peared on the globe in Cambrian times, just what
should we mean? That it began as a single point,
or as many points? When we say that the primates
first appeared in Eocene times, do we mean that
one single primate appeared then? If so, what form
went immediately before him? This is all a vain
speculation.

Does man presuppose all the vertebrate sub-king-
dom? Was he safe as long as one vertebrate form
remained? Are his forebears many, and not one
pair? Can we think of his ancestry under the image
of a tree, and of him as one of the many branches? If
so, nothing but the destruction of the tree would have
imperiled his appearance, or the lopping off of his
particular branch. Probably all such images are
misleading. We simply cannot figure to ourselves
the tangled course of our biological descent. If

231
TIME AND CHANGE

thwartings and accidents and delays could have cut
man off, how could he have escaped? We cannot
think of man as one; we are compelled to think of
him as many; and yet in all our experience the many
come from the one, or the one pair.

How thick the field of animal life in the past is
strewn with extinct forms! — as thick as the sidereal
spaces are strewn with the fragments of wrecked
worlds! But other worlds and suns are spun out of
the wrecked worlds and suns through the process of
cosmic evolution. The world-stuff is worked over
and over. Extinct animal forms must have given
rise to other, allied forms before they perished, and
these to still others, and so on down to our time.

The image of a tree is misleading from the fact
that all the different branches of the animal king-
dom, from the protozoa up to man, have come along
with what we call the higher branches, the mam-
mals; the suckers have kept pace with the mainstalk,
so that we have the image of a sheaf of branches
starting from a common origin and all of equal
length. Man has brought on his relations along with
him.

There is no glamour of romance over that past.
It was all hard, prosy, terrible fact. The earth’s
crust was less stable than now, the upheavals and
subsidences and earthquakes more frequent, the
warring of the elements more fierce and incessant,
deluge and inundation in more rapid succession, and

232
THE HAZARDS OF THE PAST

the riot and excesses of animal life far beyond any-
thing we know of. And our line of descent was tak-
ing its chances amid it all. The widespread blotting
out of life at the end of Paleozoic time, and again at
the end of Mesozoic times, when myriads of forms
were cut off, probably from some convulsion of na-
ture or some cosmic catastrophe; and again during
the ice age, when the camel, the Ilama, the, horse,
the tapir, the mastodon, the elephant, the giant
sloth, became extinct in North America — how
fared it with our ancestor during these terrible ages?
There is no sure trace of him till late Tertiary times,
and it is probably not more than two hundred thou-
sand years ago that he assumed the upright attitude
and began to use tools. Probably in Europe fifty
thousand years ago he was living in caves, clothed
in skins, contending with the cave bear and cave
lion, using rude stone implements, and hunting the
hairy mastodon, etc. In Asia the probabilities are
that he was farther on the road toward the dawn of
history.

We may think of our descent in the historic period
under the image of the stream, though of a stream
many times delayed and diverted, even many times
diminished by wars and plagues and famine, but a
stream with some sort of unity and continuity, since
man became man. The stream of life is like any
other stream in this respect. Divert or use up part

233
TIME AND CHANGE

of the water of a stream, yet what is left flows on
and keeps up the continuity and identity of the
stream; dip your cup into it here, and you will not
get precisely the same water you would have got
had none of it been diverted or used far back in its
course — you get the water that was allowed to
flow by.

Had there been no loss of life by war and pesti-
lence and accidents of various kinds, the different
countries would have been occupied by quite other
men and women than those that fill them to-day.
The course of life in every neighborhood is changed
by what seem like accidental causes, as when a fam-
ily is practically wiped out by some accident or dread
disease. This brings new people on the scene. The
farm or the business falls into other hands; and new
social relations spring up, new men and women are
brought together or the old ones driven apart, mar-
riage is hastened or retarded, opportunities for fam-
ily life are made or unmade, and fewer children, or
more children, as the case may be, are the result.
The issue of some battle hundreds or thousands of
years ago may have played a part in your life and
mine to-day — other races, other individuals of the
race, would have been thrown together had the issue
been different, and other families started, so that
some one else would have been here in our stead.

But the question of hazard to the race of man in
geologic time is quite a different one. Here our fate

234
THE HAZARDS OF THE PAST

seems to hang by a single thread—a golden thread,
we may call it, but, in that terrible maze of clashing
forces and devouring forms of the vast geologic peri-
ods, how liable to be broken! It is not now a ques-
tion of the continuity of a stream, butof the contin-
uity of a single evolutionary process, or, as Haeckel
says, the continuity of the morphological chain
which stretches from the lemurs up through tailed
and tailless anthropoid apes to man. If the evolu-
tionary impulse had been checked or extinguished in
the lemur — that small apelike animal that went
before the true ape, the fossil remains of which have
been found on this continent and the survivals of
which are now found in Madagascar — would man
have appeared? Again, if the race of lemurs devel-
oped from a single pair, how precarious seems our
fate! In fact, if any of the transitional forms be-
tween species can be reduced to a single pair — as
the forms that connect the reptiles with the mam-
mals — our fate would seem to be in the keeping
of these forms. Over this single frail bridge which
escaped the floods and the tornadoes and the earth-
quakes of those terrible ages we must have passed.
What risky business it all seems! Was it luck or law
that favored us? Doubtless, if we could penetrate
the mystery, we should see that there was no chance
or risk in the matter. We cannot go very far in
solving these great fundamental questions by ap-
plying to them the tests of our own experience.
235
TIME AND CHANGE

‘Numberless specific forms become extinct, but the
impulse that begat the form does not die out. Thus,
all the giant reptiles died out — the dinosaurs, the
mesosaurs — but the reptilian impulse still sur-
vives. How many types of invertebrates have per-
ished! but the invertebrate impulse still goes on.
How many species of mammals have been cut off!
yet the mammal impulse has steadily gone forward.
These things suggest the wave that moves on but
leaves the water behind. The vertebrate impulse
began in wormlike forms, in the old Paleozoic seas,
and stopped not till it culminated in man. This im-
pulse has left many forms behind it; but has this
impulse itself ever been endangered? If one looks at
the matter thus in an abstract instead of a concrete
way, the problem of our descent becomes easier.

When we look at the evolution of life on a grand
scale, nature seems to feel her way, like a blind man,
groping, hesitating, trying this road and then that.
In some cases the line of evolution seems to end in a
cul de sac beyond which no progress is possible. The
forms thus cornered soon become extinct. The
mystery, the unaccountable thing, is the appearance
of new characters. The slow modification or trans-
formation of an existing character may often be
traced; natural selection, or the struggle for exist-
ence, takes it in hand and adapts and perpetuates it,
or else eliminates it. But the origin of certain new
parts or characters — that is the secret of the evolu-

236
THE HAZARDS OF THE PAST

tionary process. Thus there was a time when no
animal had horns; then horns appeared. “In the
great quadruped known as titanothere,” says Os-
born, “rudiments of horns first arise independently
at certain definite parts of the skull; they arise at
first alike in both sexes, or asexually; then they be-
come sexual, or chiefly characteristic of males; then
they rapidly evolve in the males while being arrested
in development in the females; finally, they become
in some of the animals dominant characteristics to
which all others bend.”’ Nature seems to throw out
these new characters and then lets them take their
chances in the clash of forces and tendencies that
go on in the arena of life. If they serve a purpose or
are an advantage, they remain; if not, they drop
out. Nature feels her way. The horns proved of less
advantage to the females than to the males; they
seem a part of the plus or overflow of the male prin-
ciple, like the beard in man — the badge of mas-
culinity. The titanothere is traceable back to a
hornless animal the size of a sheep, and it ended in
a horned quadruped nearly as large as an elephant.
It flourished in Wyoming in early Tertiary times.
Nature did not seem to know what to do with horns
when she first got them. She played with them like
a child with a new toy. Thus she gave two pairs to
several species of mammals, one pair on the nose and
one pair on the top of the skull — certainly an em-
barrassment of weapons.
237
TIME AND CHANGE

The first horns appear to have been crude,
heavy, uncouth, but long before we reach our own
geologic era they appear in various species of quad-
rupeds, and become graceful and ornamental. How
beautiful they are in many of the African antelope
tribe!» Nature’s workmanship nearly always im-
proves with time, like that of man’s, and sooner
or later takes on an ornamental phase.

The early uncouth, bizarre forms seem to be the
result of the excess or surplus of life. Life in remote
biologic times was rank and riotous, as it is now,
in a measure, in tropical lands. One reason may be
that the climate of the globe during the middle
period, and well into the third period, appears to
have been of a tropical character. The climatic and
seasonal divisions were not at all pronounced, and
both animal and vegetable life took on gigantic
and grotesque forms. In the ugliness of alligator
and rhinoceros and hippopotamus of our day we get
some hint of what early reptilian and mammalian
life was like.

That Nature should have turned out better and
better handiwork as the ages passed; that she either
should have improved upon every model or else dis-
carded it; that she should have-progressed from the
bird, half-dragon, to the sweet songsters of our day
and to the superb forms of the air that we know;
that evolution should have entered upon a refining
and spiritualizing phase, developing larger brains

238
THE HAZARDS OF THE PAST

and smaller bodies, is a very significant fact, and
one quite beyond the range of the mechanistic con-
ception of life.

Our own immediate line of descent leads down
through the minor forms of Tertiary and Mesozoic
times — forms that probably skulked and dodged
about amid the terrible and gigantic creatures of
those ages as the small game of to-day hide and flee
from the presence of their arch-enemy, man; and
that the frail line upon which the fate of the human
race hung should not have been severed during the
wild turmoil of those ages is, to me, a source of per-
petual wonder.

II

The hazards of the future of the race must be
quite different from those I have been considering.
They are the hazards incident to an exceptional
being upon this earth — a being that takes his fate
in his own hands in a sense that no other creature
does.

Man has partaken of the fruit of the Tree of
Good and Evil, which all the lower orders have es-
caped. He knows, and knows that he knows. Will
this knowledge, through the opposition in which it
places him to elemental nature and the vast system
of artificial things with which it has enabled him to
surround himself, cut short his history upon this
planet? Will Nature in the end be avenged for the
secrets he has forced from her? His civilization has

239
TIME AND CHANGE

doubtless made him the victim of diseases to which
the lower orders, and even savage man, are strang-
ers. Will not these diseases increase as his life be-
comes more and more complex and artificial? Will
he go on extending his mastery over Nature and re-
fining or suppressing his natural appetites till his
original hold upon life is fatally enfeebled?

It seems as though science ought to save man and
prolong his stay on this planet, — it ought to bring
him natural salvation, as his religion promises him
supernatural salvation. But of course, man’s fate
is bound up with the fate of the planet and of the
biological tree of which he is one of the shoots.
Biology is rooted in geology. The higher forms of
life did not arbitrarily appear, they flowed out of
conditions that were long in maturing; they flow-
ered in season, and the flower will fall in season.
Man could not have appeared earlier than he did,
nor later than he did; he came out of what went be-
fore, and he will go out with what comes after. His
coming was natural, and his going will be natural.
His period had a beginning, and it will have an end.
Natural philosophy leads one to affirm this; but of
time measured by human history he may yet have a
lease of tens of thousands of years.

The hazard of the future is a question of both
astronomy and geology. That there are cosmic
dangers, though infinitely remote, every astronomer
knows. That there are collisions between heavenly

240
THE HAZARDS OF THE PAST

bodies is an indubitable fact, and if collisions do
happen to any, allow time enough and they must
happen to all. That there are geologic dangers
through the shifting and crumpling of the earth’s
crust, every geologist knows, though probably none
that could wipe out the whole race of man. The
biologic dangers of the past we have outlived —
the dangers that must have beset a single line of
descent amid the carnival of power and the ferocity

_ of the monster reptiles of Mesozoic times, and the
wholesale extinction of species that occurred in
different geologic periods.

Nothing but a cosmic catastrophe, involving the
fate of the whole earth, could now exterminate the
human race. It is highly improbable that this will
ever happen. The race of man will go out from a
slow, insensible failure, through the aging of the
planet, of the conditions of life that brought man
here. The evolutionary process upon a cooling
world must, after the elapse of a vast period of time,
lose its impetus and cease.
XIII
THE GOSPEL OF NATURE

I

HE other day a clergyman who described him-
self as a preacher of the gospel of Christ wrote,
asking me to come and talk to his people on the gos-
pel of Nature. The request set me to thinking
whether or not Nature has any gospel in the sense
the clergyman had in mind, any message that is
likely to be specially comforting to the average
orthodox religious person. I suppose the parson
wished me to tell his flock what I had found in Na-
ture that was a strength or a solace to myself.
What had all my many years of journeyings to
Nature yielded me that would supplement or rein-
force the gospel he was preaching? Had the birds
taught me any valuable lessons? Had the four-
footed beasts? Had the insects? Had the flowers,
the trees, the soil, the coming and the going of the
seasons? Had I really found sermons in stones,
books in running brooks and good in everything?
Had the lilies of the field, that neither toil nor spin,
and yet are more royally clad than Solomon in all
his glory, helped me in any way to clothe myself
with humility, with justice, with truthfulness?
243
TIME AND CHANGE

It is not easy for one to say just what he owes to
all these things. Natural influences work indirectly
as well as directly; they work upon the subconscious,
as well as upon the conscious, self. That I am a
saner, healthier, more contented man, with truer
standards of life, for all my loiterings in the fields
and woods, I am fully convinced.

That I am less social, less interested in my neigh-
bors and in the body politic, more inclined to shirk
civic and social responsibilities and to stop my ears
against the brawling of the reformers, is perhaps
equally true.

One thing is certain, in a hygienic way I owe
much to my excursions to Nature. They have helped
to clothe me with health, if not with humility; they
have helped sharpen and attune all my senses; they
have kept my eyes in such good trim that they have
not failed me for one moment during all the seventy-
five years I have had them; they have made my
sense of smell so keen that I have much pleasure in
the wild, open-air perfumes, especially in the spring
— the delicate breath of the blooming elms and
maples and willows, the breath of the woods, of the
pastures, of the shore. This keen, healthy sense of
smell has made me abhor tobacco and flee from close
rooms, and put the stench of cities behind me. I
fancy that this whole world of wild, natural per-
fumes is lost to the tobacco-user and to the city-
dweller. Senses trained in the open air are in tune

244
THE GOSPEL OF NATURE

with open-air objects; they are quick, delicate, and
discriminating. When I go to town, my ear suffers
as well as my nose: the impact of the city upon my
senses is hard and dissonant; the ear is stunned, the
nose is outraged, and the eye is confused. When I
come back, I go to Nature to be soothed and healed,
and to have my senses put in tune once more. I
know that, as a rule, country or farming folk arenot |
remarkable for the delicacy of their senses, but this
is owing mainly to the benumbing and brutalizing
effect of continued hard labor. It is their minds
more than their bodies that suffer.

When I have dwelt in cities the country was
always near by, and I used to get a bite of country
soil at least once a week to keep my system nor-
mal.

Emerson says that “the day does not seem wholly
profanein which we have given heed to some natural
object.” If Emerson had stopped to qualify his re-
mark, he would have added, if we give heed to it in
the right spirit, if we give heed to it as a nature-lover
and truth-seeker. Nature love as Emerson knew it,
and as Wordsworth knew it, and as any of the
choicer spirits of our time have known it, has dis-
tinctly a religious value. It does not come to a man
or a woman who is wholly absorbed in selfish or
worldly or material ends. Except ye become in a
measure as little children, ye cannot enter the king-
dom of Nature—as Audubon entered it, as Tho-

Q45
TIME AND CHANGE

reau entered it, as Bryant and Amiel entered it, and
as all those enter it who make it a resource in their
lives and an instrument of their culture. The forms
and creeds of religion change, but the sentiment of
religion—the wonder and reverence and love we feel
in the presence of the inscrutable universe — per-
sists. Indeed, these seem to be renewing their life
to-day in this growing love for all natural objects
and in this increasing tenderness toward all forms
of life. If we do not go to church so much as did our
fathers, we go to the woods much more, and are
much more inclined to make a temple of them than
they were.

We now use the word Nature very much as our
fathers used the word God, and, I suppose, back of
it all we mean the power that is everywhere present
and active, and in whose lap the visible universe is
held and nourished. It is a power that we can see
and touch and hear, and realize every moment of
our lives how absolutely we are dependent upon it.
There are no atheists or skeptics in regard to this
power. All men see how literally we are its child-
ren, and all men learn how swift and sure is the
penalty of disobedience to its commands.

Our associations with Nature vulgarize it and rob
it of its divinity. When we come to see that the
celestial and the terrestrial are one, that time and
eternity are one, that mind and matter are one, that
death and life are one, that there is and can be no-

246
THE GOSPEL OF NATURE

thing not inherent in Nature, then we no longer look
for or expect a far-off, unknown God.

Nature teaches more than she preaches. There
are no sermons in stones. It is easier to get a spark
out of a stone than a moral. Even when it contains
a fossil, it teaches history rather than morals. It
comes down from the fore-world an undigested bit
that has resisted the tooth and maw of time, and
can tell you many things if you have the eye to read
them. The soil upon which it lies or in which it is
imbedded was rock, too, back in geologic time, but
the mill that ground it up passed the fragment of
stone through without entirely reducing it. Very
likely it is made up of the minute remains of innum-
erable tiny creatures that lived and died in the an-
cient seas. Very likely it was torn from its parent
rock and brought to the place where it now lies by
the great ice-flood that many tens of thousands of
years ago crept slowly but irresistibly down out of
the North over the greater part of all the northern
continents.

But all this appeals to the intellect, and contains
no lesson for the moral nature. If we are to find
sermons in stones, we are to look for them in the re-
lations of the stones to other things — when they
are out of place, when they press down the grass or
the flowers, or impede the plow, or dull the scythe,
or usurp the soil, or shelter vermin, as do old institu-
tions and old usages that have had their day. A

QA7
TIME AND CHANGE

stone that is much knocked about gets its sharp
angles worn off, as do men. “A rolling stone gathers
no moss,” which is not bad for the stone, as moss
hastens decay. “Killing two birds with one stone”
is a bad saying, because it reminds boys to stone the
birds, which is bad for both boys and birds. But
‘People who live in glass houses should not throw
stones” is on the right side of the account, as it dis-
courages stone-throwing and reminds us that we
are no better than our neighbors.

The lesson in running brooks is that motion is a
great purifier and health-producer. When the brook
ceases to run, it soon stagnates. It keeps in touch
with the great vital currents when it is in motion,
and unites with other brooks to help make the river.
In motion it soon leaves all mud and sediment be-
hind. Do not proper work and the exercise of will
power have the same effect upon our lives?

The other day in my walk I came upon a sap-
bucket that had been left standing by the maple
tree all the spring and summer. What a bucketful
of corruption was that, a mixture of sap and rain-
water that had rotted, and smelled to heaven. Mice
and birds and insects had been drowned in it, and
added to its unsavory character. It was a bit of Na-
ture cut off from the vitalizing and purifying chem-
istry of the whole. With what satisfaction I emp-
tied it upon the ground while I held my nose and
saw it filter into the turf, where I knew it was dying

248
THE GOSPEL OF NATURE

to go and where I knew every particle of the reeking,
fetid fluid would soon be made sweet and whole-
some again by the chemistry of the soil!

II

I am not always in sympathy with nature-study
as pursued in the schools, as if this kingdom could
be carried by assault. Such study is too cold, too
special, too mechanical; it is likely to rub the bloom
off Nature. It lacks soul and emotion; it misses the
accessories of the open air and its exhilarations, the
sky, the clouds, the landscape, and the currents of
life that pulse everywhere.

I myself have never made a dead set at studying
Nature with note-book and field-glass in hand. I
have rather visited with her. We have walked to-
gether or sat down together, and our intimacy grows
with the seasons. What I have learned about her
ways I have learned easily, almost unconsciously,
while fishing or camping or idling about. My desult-
ory habits have their disadvantages, no doubt, but
they have their advantages also. A too strenuous
pursuit defeats itself. In the fields and woods more
than anywhere else all things come to those who
wait, because all things are on the move, and are
sure sooner or later to come your way.

To absorb a thing is better than to learn it, and
we absorb what we enjoy. We learn things at
school, we absorb them in the fields and woods and

249
TIME AND CHANGE

on the farm. When we look upon Nature with fond-
ness and appreciation she meets us halfway and
takes a deeper hold upon us than when studiously
conned. Hence I say the way of knowledge of Na-
ture is the way of love and enjoyment, and is more
surely found in the open air than in the school-room
or the laboratory. The other day I saw a lot of col-
lege girls dissecting cats and making diagrams of the
circulation and muscle-attachments, and I thought
it pretty poor business unless the girls were taking
@ course in comparative anatomy with a view to
some occupation in life. What is the moral and in-
tellectual value of this kind of knowledge to those
girls? Biology is, no doubt, a great science in the
hands of great men, but it is not for all. I myself
have got along very well without it. I am sure I
can learn more of what I want to know from a kit-
ten on my knee than from the carcass of a cat in
the laboratory. Darwin spent eight years dissecting
barnacles; but he was Darwin, and did not stop at
barnacles, as these college girls are pretty sure to
stop at cats. He dissected and put together again
in his mental laboratory the whole system of animal
life, and the upshot of his work was a tremendous
gain to our understanding of the universe.

I would rather see the girls in the fields and woods
studying and enjoying living nature, training their
eyes to see correctly and their hearts to respond
intelligently. What is knowledge without enjoy-

250
THE GOSPEL OF NATURE

ment, without love? It is sympathy, appreciation,
emotional experience, which refine and elevate and
breathe into exact knowledge the breath of life.
My own interest is in living nature as it moves
and flourishes about me winter and summer.

I know it is one thing to go forth as a nature-lover,
and quite another to go forth in a spirit of cold,
calculating, exact science. I call myself a nature-
lover and not a scientific naturalist. All that sci-
ence has to tell me is welcome, is, indeed, eagerly
sought for. I must know as well as feel. I am not
merely contented, like Wordsworth’s poet, to enjoy
what others understand. I must understand also;
but above all things I must enjoy. How much of my
enjoyment springs from my knowledge I do not
know. The joy of knowing is very great; the delight
of picking up the threads of meaning here and there,
and following them through the maze of confusing
facts, I know well. When I hear the woodpecker
drumming on a dry limb in spring or the grouse
drumming in the woods, and know what it is all for,
why, that knowledge, I suppose, is part of my enjoy-
ment. The other part is the associations that those
sounds call up as voicing the arrival of spring: they
are the drums that lead the joyous procession.

To enjoy understandingly, that, I fancy, is the
great thing to be desired. When I see the large
ichneumon-fly, Thalessa, making a loop over her
back with her long ovipositor and drilling a hole in

Q51
TIME AND CHANGE

the trunk of a tree, I do not fully appreciate the
spectacle till I know she is feeling for the burrow of
a tree-borer, Tremex, upon the larvee of which her
own young feed. She must survey her territory like
an oil-digger and calculate where she is likely to
strike oil, which in her case is the burrow of her host
Tremexz. There is a vast series of facts in natural
history like this that are of little interest until we
understand them. They are like the outside of a
book which may attract us, but which can mean
little to us until we have opened and perused its
pages.

The nature-lover is not looking for mere facts,
but for meanings, for something he can translate
into the terms of his own life. He wants facts, but
significant facts — luminous facts that throw light
upon the ways of animate and inanimate nature.
A bird picking up crumbs from my window-sill does
not mean much to me. It is a pleasing sight and
touches a tender cord, but it does not add much to
my knowledge of bird-life. But when I see a bird
pecking and fluttering angrily at my window-pane,
as I now and then do in spring, apparently under
violent pressure to get in, I am witnessing a signi-
ficant comedy in bird-life, one that illustrates the
limits of animal instinct. The bird takes its own
reflected image in the glass for a hated rival, and is
bent on demolishing it. Let the assaulting bird get
a glimpse of the inside of the empty room through

252
THE GOSPEL OF NATURE

a broken pane, and it is none the wiser; it returns
to the assault as vigorously as ever.

The fossils in the rocks did not mean much to the
earlier geologists. They looked upon them as freaks
of Nature, whims of the creative energy, or vestiges
of Noah’s flood. You see they were blinded by the
preconceived notions of the six-day theory of crea-
tion.

mI

I do not know that the bird has taught me any
valuable lesson. Indeed, I do not go to Nature to
be taught. I go for enjoyment and companionship.
I go to bathe in her as in a sea; I go to give my eyes
and ears and all my senses a free, clean field and to
tone up my spirits by her “primal sanities.” If the
bird has not preached to me, it has added to the re-
sources of my life, it has widened the field of my
interests, it has afforded me another beautiful ob-
ject to love, and has helped make me feel more at
home in this world. To take-the birds out of my life
would be like lopping off somany branches from the
tree: there is so much less surface of leafage to absorb
the sunlight and bring my spirits in contact with the
vital currents. We cannot pursue any natural study
with love and enthusiasm without the object of it
. becoming a part of our lives. The birds, the flowers,
the trees, the rocks, all become linked with our lives
and hold the key to our thoughts and emotions.

Not till the bird becomes a part of your life can

253
TIME AND CHANGE

its coming and its going mean much to you. And
it becomes a part of your life when you have taken
heed of it with interest and affection, when you have
established associations with it, when it voices the
spring or the summer to you, when it calls up the
spirit of the woods or the fields or the shore. When
year after year you have heard the veery in the
beech and birch woods along the trout streams, or
the wood thrush May after May in the groves where
* you have walked or sat, and the bobolink summer
after summer in the home meadows, or the vesper
sparrow in the upland pastures where you have loi-
tered as a boy or mused as a man, these birds will
really be woven into the texture of your life.

What lessons the birds have taught me I cannot
recall; what a joy they have been to me I know well.
In a new place, amid strange scenes, theirs are the
voices and the faces of old friends. In Bermuda the
bluebirds and the catbirds and the cardinals seemed
to make American territory of it. Our birds had
annexed the island despite the Britishers.

For many years I have in late April seen the red-
poll warbler, perhaps for only a single day, flitting
about as I walked or worked. It is usually my first
warbler, and my associations with it are very pleas-
ing. But I really did not know how pleasing until,
one March day, when I was convalescing from a
serious illness in one of our sea-coast towns, I
chanced to spy the little traveler in a vacant lot

254
THE GOSPEL OF NATURE

along the street, now upon the ground, now upon a
bush, nervous and hurried as usual, uttering its
sharp chip, and showing the white in its tail. The
sight gave me a real home feeling. It did me more
good than the medicine I was taking. It instantly
made a living link with many past springs. Any-
thing that calls up a happy past, how it warms the
present! There, too, that same day I saw my first
meadowlark of the season in a vacant lot, flashing
out the white quills in her tail, and walking over the
turf in the old, erect, alert manner. The sight was
as good as a letter from home, and better: it had a
flavor of the wild and of my boyhood days on the
old farm that no letter could ever have.

The spring birds always awaken a thrill wherever
Iam. The first bobolink I hear flying over north-
ward and bursting out in song now and then, full of
anticipation of those broad meadows where he will
soon be with his mate; or the’first swallow twitter-
ing joyously overhead, borne on a warm southern
breeze; or the first high-hole sounding out his long,
iterated call from the orchard or field — how all
these things send a wave of emotion over me!

Pleasures of another kind are to find a new bird, and
to see an old bird in a new place, asI did recently in
theold sugar-bush where I used tohelp gather and boil
sap asa boy. It was the logcock, or pileated wood-
pecker, a rare bird anywhere, and one I had never
seen before on the old farm. I heard his loud cackle

255
TIME AND CHANGE

in a maple tree, saw him flit from branch to branch
for a few moments, and then launch out and fly
toward a distant wood. But he left an impression
with me that I should be sorry to have missed.
Nature stimulates our esthetic and our intellect-
ual life and to a certain extent our religious emo-
tions, but I fear we cannot find much support for
our ethical system in the ways of wild Nature. I
know our artist naturalist, Ernest Thompson Seton,
claims to find what we may call the biological value
of the Ten Commandments in the lives of the wild
animals; but I cannot make his reasoning hold
water, at least not much of it. Of course the Ten
Commandments are not arbitrary laws. They are
largely founded upon the needs of the social or-
ganism; but whether they have the same foundation
in the needs of animal life apart from man, apart
from the world of moral obligation, is another ques-
tion. The animals are neither moral nor immoral:
they are unmoral; their needs are all physical. It is
true that the command against murder is pretty well
kept by the higher animals. They rarely kill their own
kind: hawks do not prey upon hawks, nor foxes prey
upon foxes, nor weasels upon weasels; but lower down
this does not hold. Trout eat trout, and pickerel eat
pickerel, and among the insects young spiders eat
one another, and the female spider eats her mate,
if she can get him. There is but little, if any, neigh-
borly love among even the higher animals. They
256
THE GOSPEL OF NATURE

treat one another as rivals, or associate for mutual
protection. One cow will lick and comb another in
the most affectionate manner, and the next moment
savagely gore her. Hate and cruelty for the most
part rule in the animal world. A few of the higher
animals are monogamous, but by far the greater
number of species are polygamous or promiscuous.
There is no mating or pairing in the great bovine
tribe, and none among the rodents that I know of,
or among the bear family, or the cat family, or
among the seals. When we come to the birds, we find
mating, and occasional pairing for life, as with the
ostrich and perhaps the eagle.

As for the rights of property among the animals,
I do not see how we can know just how far those
rights are respected among individuals of the same
species. We know that bees will rob bees, and that
ants will rob ants; but whether or not one chip-
munk or one flying squirrel or one wood mouse will
plunder the stores of another I do not know. Prob-
ably not, as the owner of such stores is usually on
hand to protect them. Moreover, these provident lit-
tle creatures all lay up stores in the autumn, before
the season of scarcity sets in, and so have no need to
plunder one another. In case the stores of one squir-
rel were destroyed by some means, and it were able
to dispossess another of its hoard, would it not in
that case be a survival of the fittest, and so condu-
cive to the well-being of the race of squirrels?

257
TIME AND CHANGE

T have never known any of our wild birds to steal
the nesting-material of another bird of the same
kind, but I have known birds to try to carry off the
material belonging to other species.

But usually the rule of might is the rule of right
among the animals. As to most of the other com-
mandments, — of coveting, of bearing false wit-
ness, of honoring the father and the mother, and so
forth, — how can these apply to the animals or have
any biological value to them? Parental obedience
among them is not a very definite thing. There is
neither obedience nor disobedience, because there
are no commands. The alarm-cries of the parents
are quickly understood by the young, and their ac-
tions imitated in the presence of danger, all of
which of course has a biological value.

The instances which Mr. Seton cites of animals
fleeing to man for protection from their enemies
prove to my mind only how the greater fear drives
out the lesser. The hotly pursued animal sees a pos-
sible cover in a group of men and horses or in an
unoccupied house, and rushes there to hide. What
else could the act mean? So a hunted deer or sheep
will leap from a precipice which, under ordinary
circumstances, it would avoid. So would a man.
Fear makes bold in such cases.

I certainly have found “good in everything,” —
in all natural processes and products, — not the
“good” of the Sunday-school books, but the good of

258
“THE GOSPEL OF NATURE

natural law and order, the good of that system of
things out of which we came and which is the source
of our health and strength. It is good that fire
should burn, even if it consumes your house; it is
good that force should crush, even if it crushes you;
it is good that rain should fall, even if it destroys
your crops or floods your Jand. Plagues and pesti-
lences attest the constancy of natural law. They set
us to cleaning our streets and houses and to readjust-
ing our relations to outward nature. Only in a live
universe could disease and death prevail. Death is
a phase of life, a redistributing of the type. Decay
is another kind of growth.

Yes, good in everything, because law in every-
thing, truth in everything, the sequence of cause and
effect in everything, and it may all be good to me if
on the right principles I relate my life to it. I can
make the heat and the cold serve me, the winds and
the floods, gravity and all the chemical and dynami-
cal forces, serve me, if I take hold of them by the
right handle. The bad in things arises from our
abuse or misuse of them or from our wrong relations
to them. A thing is good or bad according as it
stands related to my constitution. We say the order
of nature is rational; but is it not because our reason
is the outcome of that order? Our well-being consists
in learning it and in adjusting our lives to it. When.
we cross it or seek to contravene it, we are destroyed.
But Nature in her universal procedures is not ra-

259
TIME AND CHANGE

tional, as I am rational when I weed my garden,
prune my trees, select my seed or my stock, or arm
myself with tools or weapons. In such matters I
take a short cut to that which Nature reaches by a
slow, roundabout, and wasteful process. How does
she weed her garden? By the survival of the fittest.
How does she select her breeding-stock? By the law
of battle; the strongest rules. Hers, I repeat, is a
slow and wasteful process. She fertilizes the soil by
plowing in the crop. She cannot take a short cut.
She assorts and arranges her goods by the law of the
winds and the tides. She builds up with one hand
and pulls down with the other. Man changes the
conditions to suit the things. Nature changes the
things to suit the conditions. She adapts the plant
or the animal to its environment. She does not
drain her marshes; she fills them up. Hers is the
larger reason — the reason of the All. Man’s reason
introduces a new method; it cuts across, modifies,
or abridges the order of Nature.

I donot see design in Nature in the old teleological
sense; but I see everything working to its own pro-
per end, and that end is foretold in the means.
Things are not designed; things are begotten. It is as
if the final plan of a man’s house, after he had begun
to build it, should be determined by the winds and
the rains and the shape of the ground upon which it
stands. The eye is begotten by those vibrations in
the ether called light, the ear by those vibrations in

260
THE GOSPEL OF NATURE

the air called sound, the sense of smell by those
emanations called odors. There are probably other
vibrations and emanations that we have no senses
for because our well-being does not demand them.

We think it reasonable that a stone should fall
and that smoke should rise because we have never
known either of them to do the contrary. We think
it reasonable that fire should burn and that frost
should freeze, because this accords with universal
experience. Thus, there is a large order of facts
that are reasonable because they are invariable: the
same effect always follows the same cause. Our
reason is developed and disciplined by observing
the order of Nature; and yet human rationality is of
another order from the rationality of Nature. Man
learns from Nature how to master and control her.
He turns her currents into new channels; he spurs
her in directions of hisown. Nature has no economic
or scientific rationality. She progresses by the
method of trial and error. Her advance is symbol-
ized by that of the child learning to walk. She ex-
periments endlessly. Evolution has worked all
around the horizon. In feeling her way to man she
has produced thousands of other forms of life. The
globe is peopled as it is because the creative energy
was blind and did not at once find the single straight
road to man. Had the law of variation worked only
in one direction, man might have found himself the
sole occupant of the universe. Behold the varieties

261
TIME AND CHANGE

of trees, of shrubs, of grasses, of birds, of insects,
because Nature does not work as man does, with
an eye single to one particular end. She scatters,
she sows her seed upon the wind, she commits her
germs to the waves and the floods. Nature is in-
different to waste, because what goes out of one
pocket goes into another. She is indifferent to fail-
ure, because failure on one line means success on
some other.
IV

But I am not preaching much of a gospel, am I?
Only the gospel of contentment, of appreciation, of
heeding simple near-by things — a gospel the bur-
den of which still is love, but.love that goes hand in
hand with understanding.

There is so much in Nature that is lovely and lov-
able, and so much that gives us pause. But here it
is, and here we are, and we must make the most of it.
If the ways of the Eternal as revealed in his works
are past finding out, we must still unflinchingly face
what our reason reveals to us. “Red in tooth and
claw.” Nature does not preach; she enforces, she
executes. All her answers are yea, yea, or nay, nay.
Of the virtues and beatitudes of which the gospel of
Christ makes so much — meekness, forgiveness, self-
denial, charity, love, holiness — she knows nothing.
* Put yourself in her way, and she crushes you; she
burns you, freezes you, stings you, bites you, or
devours you.

262
THE GOSPEL OF NATURE

Yet I would not say that the study of Nature did
not favor meekness or sobriety or gentleness or for-
giveness or charity, because the great Nature stud-
ents and prophets, like Darwin, would rise up and
confound me. Certainly it favors seriousness, truth-
fulness, and simplicity of life; or, are only the seri-
ous and single-minded drawn to the study of Na-
ture? I doubt very much if it favors devoutness or
holiness, as those qualities are inculcated by the
church, or any form of religious enthusiasm. De-
voutness and holiness come of an attitude toward
the universe that is in many ways incompatible with
that implied by the pursuit of natural science. The
joy of the Nature student like Darwin or any great
naturalist is to know, to find out the reason of
things and the meaning of things, to trace the foot-
steps of the creative energy; while the religious
devotee is intent only upon losing himself in infinite
being. True, there have been devout naturalists and
men of science; but their devoutness did not date
from their Nature studies, but from their training,
or from the times in which they lived. Theology
and science, it must be said, will not mingle much
better than oil and water, and your devout scientist
and devout Nature student lives in two separate
compartments of his being at different times. In-
tercourse with Nature—I mean intellectual inter-
course, not merely the emotional intercourse of the
sailor or explorer or farmer — tends to beget a habit

263
TIME AND CHANGE

of mind the farthest possible removed from the
myth-making, the vision-seeing, the voice-hearing
habit and temper. In all matters relating to the vis-
ible, concrete universe it substitutes broad daylight
for twilight; it supplants fear with curiosity; it over-
throws superstition with fact; it blights credulity
with the frost of skepticism. I say frost of skepti-
cism advisedly. Skepticism is a much more health-
ful and robust habit of mind than the limp, pale-
blooded, non-resisting habit that we call credulity.

In intercourse with Nature you are dealing with
things at first hand, and you get a rule, a standard,
that serves you through life. You are dealing with
primal sanities, primal honesties, primal attraction;
you are touching at least the hem of the garment
with which the infinite is clothed, and virtue goes
out from it to you. It must be added that you are
dealing with primal cruelty, primal blindness, pri-
mal wastefulness, also. Nature works with refer-
ence to no measure of time, no bounds of space, and
no limits of material. Her economies are not our
economies. She is prodigal, she is careless, she is
indifferent; yet nothing is lost. What she lavishes
with one hand, she gathers in with the other. She
is blind, yet she hits the mark because she shoots in
all directions. Her germs fill the air; the winds and
the tides are her couriers. When you think you have
defeated her, your triumph is hers; it is still by her
laws that you reach your end.

264
THE GOSPEL OF NATURE

We make ready our garden in a season, and plant
our seeds and hoe our crops by some sort of system.
Can any one tell how many hundreds of millions of
years Nature has been making ready her garden and
planting her seeds?

There can be little doubt, I think, but that inter-
course with Nature and a knowledge of her ways
tends to simplicity of life. We come more and more
to see through the follies and vanities of the world
and to appreciate the real values. We load ourselves
up with so many false burdens, our complex civiliza-
tion breeds in us so many false or artificial wants,
that we become separated from the real sources of
our strength and health as by a gulf.

For my part, as I grow older I am more and more
inclined to reduce my baggage, to lop off superflu-
ities. I become more and more in love with simple
things and simple folk — a small house, a hut in the
woods, a tent on the shore. The show and splendor
of great houses, elaborate furnishings, stately
halls, oppress me, impose upon me. They fix the
attention upon false values, they set up a false
standard of beauty; they stand between me and the
real feeders of character and thought. A man needs
a good roof over his head winter and summer, and a
good chimney and a big wood-pile in winter. The
more open his four walls are, the more fresh air he
will get, and the longer he will live.

How the contemplation of Nature as a whole does

265
TIME AND CHANGE

take the conceit out of us! How we dwindle to mere
specks and our little lives to the span of a moment
in the presence of the cosmic bodies and the inter-
stellar spaces! How we hurry! How we husband
our time! A year, a month, aday, an hour may
mean so much to us. Behold the infinite leisure of
Nature!

A few trillions or quadrillions of years, what mat-
ters it to the Eternal? Jupiter and Saturn must be
billions of years older than the earth. They are evid-
ently yet passing through that condition of cloud
and vapor and heat that the earth passed through
untold zons ago, and they will not reach the stage
of life till seons to come. But what matters it? Only
man hurries. Only the Eternal has infinite time.
When life comes to Jupiter, the earth will doubtless
long have been @ dead world. It may continue a
dead world for zeons longer before it is melted up in
the eternal crucible and recast, and set on its career
of life again.

Familiarity with the ways of the Eternal as they
are revealed in the physical universe certainly tends
to keep a man sane and sober and safeguards him
against the vagaries and half-truths which our creeds
and indoor artificial lives tend to breed. Shut away
from Nature, or only studying her through religious
fears and superstitions, what a mess a large body of
mankind in all ages have made of it! Think of the
obsession of the speedy “‘end of the world” which

266
THE GOSPEL OF NATURE

has so often taken possession of whole communities,
as if a world that has been an eternity in forming
could end in a day, or on the striking of the clock!
It is not many years since a college professor pub-
lished a book figuring out, from some old historical
documents and predictions, just the year in which
the great mundane show would break up. When I
was a small boy at school in the early forties, during
the Millerite excitement about the approaching end
of all mundane things, I remember, on the day
when the momentous event was expected to take
place, how the larger school-girls were thrown into
a great state of alarm and agitation by a thunder-
cloud that let down a curtain of rain, blotting out
the mountain on the opposite side of the valley.
“There it comes!” they said, and their tears flowed
copiously. I remember that I did not share their
fears, but watched the cloud, curious as to what the
end of the world would be like. I cannot brag, as
Thoreau did, when he said he would not go around
the corner to see the world blow up. I am quite sure
my curiosity would get the better of me and that I
should go, even at this late day. Or think of the
more harmless obsession of many good people about
the second coming of Christ, or about the resurrec-
tion of the physical body when the last trumpet
shall sound. A little natural knowledge ought to be
fatal to all such notions. Natural knowledge shows
us how transient and insignificant we are, and how
267
TIME AND CHANGE

vast and everlasting the world is, which was zons
before we were, and will be other zeons after we are
gone, yea, after the whole race of man is gone.
Natural knowledge takes the conceit out of us, and
is the sure antidote to all our petty anthropomorphic
views of the universe.

Vv

I was struck by this passage in one of the recently
published letters of Saint-Gaudens: “The principal
thought in my life is that we are on a planet going
no one knows where, probably to something higher
(on the Darwinian principle of evolution); that,
whatever it is, the passage is terribly sad and tragic,
and to bear up at times against what seems to be the
Great Power that is over us, the practice of love,
charity, and courage are the great things.”

The “Great Power” that is over us does seem un-
mindful of us as individuals, if it does not seem
positively against us, as Saint-Gaudens seemed to
think it was.

Surely the ways of the Eternal are not as our
ways. Our standards of prudence, of economy, of
usefulness, of waste, of delay, of failure — how far
off they seem from the scale upon which the uni-
verse is managed or deports itself! If the earth
should be blown to pieces to-day, and all life in-
stantly blotted out, would it not be just like what
we know of the cosmic prodigality and indifference?

268
THE GOSPEL OF NATURE

Such appalling disregard of all human motives and
ends bewilders us.

Of all the planets of our system probably only
two or three are in a condition to sustain life. Mer-
cury, the youngest of them all, is doubtless a dead
world, with absolute zero on one side and a furnace
temperature on the other. But what matters it?
Whose loss or gain is it? Life seems only an incident
in the universe, evidently not an end. It appears or it
does not appear, and who shall say yea or nay? The
asteroids at one time no doubt formed a planet be-
tween Mars and Jupiter. Some force which no adjec-
tive can describe or qualify blew it into fragments,
and there, in its stead, is this swarm of huge rocks
making their useless rounds in the light of the sun
forever and ever. What matters it to the prodigal
All? Bodies larger than our sun collide in the depths
of space before our eyes with results so terrific that
words cannot even hint them. The last of these colli-
sions — of this “wreck of matter and crush of
worlds ’’ — reported itself to our planet in Febru-
ary, 1901, when a star of the twelfth magnitude
suddenly blazed out as a star of the first magnitude
and then slowly faded. It was the grand finale of the
independent existence of two enormous celestial bod-
ies. They apparently ended in dust that whirled away
in the vast abyss of siderial space, blown by: the
winds upon which suns and systems drift as autumn
leaves. It would be quite in keeping with the ob-

269
TIME AND CHANGE

served ways of the Eternal, if these bodies had had
worlds in their train, teeming with life, which met
the same fate as the central colliding bodies.
Does not force as we know it in this world go its
own way with the same disregard of the precious
thing we call life? Such long and patient prepara-
tions for it, — apparently the whole stellar system
in labor pains to bring it forth, — and yet held so
cheaply and indifferently in the end! The small in-
sect that just now alighted in front of my jack-plane
as I was dressing a timber, and was reduced to a
faint yellow stain upon the wood, is typical of the
fate of man before the unregarding and unswerving
terrestrial and celestial forces. The great wheels
go round just the same whether they are crushing
the man or crushing the corn for his bread. It is all
one to the Eternal. Flood, fire, wind, gravity, are
for us or against us indifferently. And yet the earth
is here, garlanded with the seasons and riding in the
celestial currents like a ship in calm summer seas,
and man is here with all things under his feet. All
is well in our corner of the universe. The great mill
has made meal of our grist and not of the miller.
We have taken our chances and have won. More
has been for us than against us. During the little
segment of time that man has been upon the earth,
only one great calamity that might be called cosmi-
cal has befallen it. The ice age of one or two hun-
dred thousand years was such a calamity. But man
270
THE GOSPEL OF NATURE

survived it. The spring came again, and life, the
traveler, picked itself up and made a new start.
But if he had not survived it, if nothing had sur-
vived it, the great procession would have gone on
just the same; the gods would have been just as well
pleased.

‘The battle is to the strong, the race is to the fleet.
This is the order of nature. No matter for the rest,
for the weak, the slow, the unlucky, so that the fight
is won, so that the race of man continues. You and I
may fail and fall before our time; the end may bea
tragedy or a comedy. What matters it? Only some
one must succeed, will succeed.

We are here, I say, because, in the conflict of
forces, the influences that made for life have been in
the ascendant. This conflict of forces has been a
part of the process of our development. We have
been ground out as between an upper and a nether
millstone, but we have squeezed through, we have
actually arrived, and are all the better for the grind-
ing — all those who have survived. But, alas for
those whose lives went out in the crush! Maybe
they often broke the force of the blow for us.

Nature is not benevolent; Nature is just, gives
pound for pound, measure for measure, makes no
exceptions, never tempers her decrees with mercy,
or winks at any infringement of her laws. And in
the end is not this best? Could the universe be run
as a charity or a benevolent institution, or as a poor-

271
TIME AND CHANGE

house of the most approved pattern? Without this
merciless justice, this irrefragable law, where should
we have brought up long ago? It is a hard gospel;
but rocks are hard too, yet they form the founda-
tions of the hills.

Man introduces parece mercy, altruism,

‘into the world, and he pays the price in his added
burdens; and he reaps his reward in the vast social
and civic organizations that were impossible with-
out these things.

I have no doubt that the life of man upon this
planet will end, as all other forms of life will end.
But the potential man will continue and does con-
tinue on other spheres. One cannot think of one
part of the universe as producing man, and no other
part as capable of it. The universe is all of a piece
so far as its material constituents are concerned;
that we know. Can there be any doubt that it is
all of a piece so far as its invisible and intangible
forces and capabilities are concerned? Can we be-
lieve that the earth is an alien and a stranger in the
universe? that it has no near kin? that there is no
tie of blood, so to speak, between it and the other
planets and systems? Are the planets not all of one
family, sitting around the same central source of
warmth and life? And is not our system a member
of a still larger family or tribe, and it of a still larger,
all bound together by ties of consanguinity? Size
is nothing, space is nothing. The worlds are only

272
THE GOSPEL OF NATURE

red corpuscles in the arteries of the infinite. If man
has not yet appeared on the other planets, he will in
’ time appear, and when he has disappeared from this
globe, he will still continue elsewhere.

I do not say that he is the end and aim of crea-
tion; it would be logical, I think, to expect a still
higher form. Man has been man but a little while
comparatively, less than one hour of the twenty-
four of the vast geologic day; a few hours more and
he will be gone; less than another geologic day like
the past, and no doubt all life from the earth will be
gone. What then? The game will be played over
and over again in other worlds, without approach-
ing any nearer the final end than we are now. ‘There
is no final end, as there was no absolute beginning,
and can be none with the infinite. ,

THE END
INDEX

Aprronpacxk Mountains, 94, 96, 109.

Agassiz, Louis, disbelief in evolu-
tion, 1, 157; first conception of the
continental ice-sheet, 157.

Aiken, Mr., of the island of Maui,
attentions received from, 133-
136.

Andrews, Judge, of Hilo, Hawaii,
149.

Animals, unmorality of, 256-258;
fleeing to man for protection, 258.
See also Life.

Appalachian Mountains, 92, 94.

Arizona, Bad Lands of, 103.

Armor, and immobility, 225.

Astronomy, and biology, 206, 207.

Bad Lands, Arizona, 103.

Beginnings, 12.

Bergson, Henri Louis, his Creative
Evolution, 202 note; on armored
organisms, 225; on intelligence
and instinct, 230.

Bermuda, American birds in, 254.

Biological tree, the image mislead-
ing, 232.

Biology, its new career under evolu-
tion, 206, 207; rooted in geology,
240; not for all men, 250.

Birds, and reflected images, 252;
lessons from, 253-256; mating for
dife, 257; stealing nesting-mate-
tial, 258.

Bluebird (Stalia sialis), evolution

of, 201.

Bluebird (Ssalia sp.), in the Yosem-
ite, 78.

Bobolink (Dolichonyx oryztvorus),
255.

Boulders, glacier-borne, 163, 164.

Brain, the, evolution of, 16.

Gafions, Nature’s studies in, 44, 45.
See also Grand Cafion.
Cathedral Rocks, 73.

 

Catskills, the, geological structure,
92, 93; erosion in, 184-186.

Cell, the, the unit of life, 35.

Chamberlin, Thomas C., and R. D.
Salisbury, their Geology, 101.

Chemistry, of the rocks, 105-108;
and life, 209-211.

Chief Mountain, 172.

Chin, the, man’s only exclusive
member, 31.

Clover, white, 137.
Colorado River, erosion
Grand Cafion, 61-64.
Cope, Edward D., 19, 20.

Country, life in the, 244, 245.

Craters, Haleakala, 138-143; Ki-
lauea, 150-155.

Creation, a continuous process, 188;
by fiat and by evolution, 203,
204; by chemistry and mechanics,
211.

Cuvier, 88.

in the

Dana, James Dwight, quoted, 10,
171; 101.

Darwin, Charles, made the theory
of evolution alive and real, 206;
218, 250.

Dawson, Sir John William, disbe-
lief in evolution, 1, 2.

Diamond Head, Oahu,
131.

Dinosaurs, 16.

Dryopithecus, 222.

Dutton, Maj. Clarence Edward,
quoted, 51, 60, 61.

121, 130,

Earth, the, history of, 13-15, 21-23,
88, 89; ripening of, 23; age of, 85;
its growth, 86, 87; crust of, 95;
tranquillity of its history, 111-
113; changes in the crust of, 114-
116, 171, 172; vitality of, 187;
ultimate fate of, 268, 269. See
also Geology and World. - :

275
INDEX

Earthquakes, 171, 172.

EI Capitan, 73.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, quoted, 97,
98, 187, 245; a follower of Agas-
siz, 98.

Environment, influence of, 214, 215.

Eohippus, 176.

Erosion, in the Hawaiian Islands,
59, 135, 146-148; its part in shap-
ing the earth’s surface, 91; slow-
ness of its work, 182-186.

Evolution, the long road of, 1-38;

belief and disbelief in the doctrine,

1-7; adds greatly to the wonder of

life, 3; length of time implied by,

7-11; endless beginning and end-

less ending, 12; from the simple

to the complex, 23, 24; concen-

trates along certain lines, 36;

hard to get on‘intimate terms

with, 177; makes the universe

alive, 187; the tide at the full, 192,

193; Walt Whitman as an evolu-

tionist, 197; hindrances to a belief

in, 198-205; the largest general-

ization of the modern mind, 205;

not a godless doctrine, 212; as a

prestidigitator, 213, 214; makes

the world over for us, 228; the

, impulse in, 236.},

Faith, scientific, 175-186.

Fire, here before man, 111.

First Cause, 217-219.

Frear, Mary Dillingham, quoted,
119; 125; a walk with, 128-130.
Frear, Walter Francis, 125; a walk

with, 128-130.

Generalization, in evolution, 230.

Geologic time, figured under the
symbol of a year, 21, 22; and
chronological time, 90, 91; clock
of, 95; and human history, 97;
periods of, 116, 117; powers of,
174; vastness of, 199, 200.

Geologist, the, his scientific imagina-
tion, 87; interpreter of the records
of the rocks, 88; his daring affrm-
ations,.89; deals with big figures,
97.

Geology, in the East and in the

 

West, 39-45; of the Grand Cafion;
51-55, 57-65, 67-69; of the
Yosemite, 79-83; the world as
seen in the light of, 85-117. See
also Earth, Evolution, and Rocks.

Geosyncline, 94.

Gigantic, Nature’s experiments with
the, 16-18, 223.

Glacial periods, gradual approach
of the Pleistocene winter, 113,
114.

Glaciation, Agassiz’s discovery,
157; southern limit in United
States, 158, 159; work of the ice-
sheet, 159, 160; evidence near
home, 161-163; flowing of the
ice-sheet, 164, 165.

Glenwood, Hawaii, 149, 150.

Goats, wild, 138, 143.

God, immanent in his universe, 179,
199. .

“Good in everything,” 258, 259. 4

Grand Cafion, the, first impressions,
46-49; architectural features and
suggestions, 49-54; geology, 51-
55, 57-65, 67-69; cleanness, 55;
sense of depth of, 56; look of
ordered strength, 56, 57; descent
into, 65-70; flowers and a bird-
song in, 70; contrasted with
Yosemite, 75-78.

Granite, the Adam rock, 102, 103;
dissolution of, 108.

Guava, 135.

Haeckel, Ernst Heinrich, 7, 25,
235.

Haleakala, a visit to, 133-146.

Halemaumau, 151.

Half Dome, 73.

Hau-tree, 126, 127.

Hawaii, island of, 143, 148; visit to,
149-155.

Hawaiian Islands, erosion in, 59,
135, 146-148; shape of valleys in,
81; origin of, 116; a visit to, 119-
155; lines by Mary Dillingham
Frear:on, 119; approach to, 119-
121; land shells of, 129, 130; birds
in, 132, 133, 143, 151; mosquitoes
in, 136.

Hawaiian language, 122.

276
, INDEX

Hawaiians, diving boys, 122; surf-
riding, 131. :

Heart, the, origin of, 19.

Heat, its relation to life, 210, 211.

Henry Mountains, 173.

Hetch-Hetchy Valley, 79, 80. j

Hilo, 149, 155. 4

Honey-sucker, 151.

Honolulu, harbor of, 121, 122; first
impressions of the city, 122, 123;
population, 123, 124; attractions,
124; Americans in, 124, 125; the
skylark at, 132, 133.

Horn-fly, Texas, 137.

Horns, in evolution, 237, 238.

Horse, the, evolution of, 33,, 176;
mankind and, 229.

Hudson River, mineral matter car-
ried by, 169; geology of the two
sides at New York, 178, 174.

Huxley, Thomas Henry, 218.

Tao Valley, 134, 146.

Ice-sheet, continental. See Glacia-
tion.

Ichneumon-fly, 251, 252.

Imagination, the scientific and the
poetic, 87, 88.

Japanese, in the Hawaiian Islands,
134, 136, 149.

Kahoolawe, 146.

Kahului, 133.

Kauai, 147, 148.

Kilauea, 133; visit to the volcano,
149-155.

King’s River Valley, 79, 80.

Laccolites, 172, 173.

Lahaina, 147, 149.

Land, a farmer’s strong, 158.

Lantana, 125, 126, 145.

Lark. See Skylark.

Laurentian Hills, 109.

Lava, 151-153, 172, 173.

Lemurs, 235.

Liberty Cap, 74, 75.

Life (biological), dawn of, 5; artifi-
cial production of, 11, 209, 210; as-
cending series of, 18-21; progress
from the simple to the cdmplex,

 

23, 24; the mystery of its incep-
tion, 37, 38; geologic periods of,
116, 117; rises on stepping-stones
of its dead self, 117; the tide at
the full, 192, 193; nature of, 207—
209; dependent on heat and chem-
ical action, 210, 211; origin of,
217-219; the tree of, 232; the
stream of, 233; rankness in early
biologic times, 238. See also Evo-
lution.

Limestone, 108, 110.

Locomotion, evolution of, 21.

Logcock. See Woodpecker, north-
ern pileated.

London, fossil fruits under, 26.

Lowell, Mr., superintendent of
sugar-making plant in Hawaiian
Islands, 148.

Lowell, Percival, 193.

Lyell, Sir Charles,
quoted, 105.

82, 99-101;

Malaspina Glacier, 160.

Mammals, origin of, 19.

Man, origin of, 1-13, 21, 175-181,
188-194; larger than his ancestors,
18; the end of the life series, 22;
the goal of life’s progress, 24, 25;
his specialization in the brain, 26,
27; has had the experience of all
the animals below him, 28, 29;
loss and gain of organs and pow-
ers in the course of his develop-
ment, 30-33; fortuitous variation
insufficient to sccount for the
evolution of, 38; his ancestry, 97,
98; physical and mental evolu-
tion of, 189; continuity of his
descent, 190-192; future evolu-
tion of, 194-196; seems of another
sphere than the animals, 202,
203; creation of, 203-205; varia-
tion in, 215-217; his evolution
and the First Cause, 218, 219;
not a fallen, but a risen, creature,
219; heir of the geologic ages, 220,
221; concrete conceptions of his
descent, 221-223; hazards en~
countered in the line of his de-
scent, 225-239; one of the most
generalized of animals, 230; haz-

Q77
INDEX

ards of his future, 239-241; and
altruism, 272; ultimate fate of
the race, 272, 273; his existence
on other spheres, 272, 273.

Mango, 124, 134.

Maui, 129; a visit to, 133-149; shape
of, 147.

Mauna Kea, 148, 155.

Mauna Loa, 143, 148, 155.

Merced River, 71, 80. See
Yosemite.

Mercury, the planet, 269.

Millerite excitement, 267.

Mina, 132, 143. :

Mind, human and animal, 202. «

Mirror Lake, 73.

Mississippi River, mineral matter
carried by, 169.

Molokai, 121, 148.

Monophyletic hypothesis, the, 231.

Monroe, Miss Harriet, 47.

Montana, an over-thrust in, 172.

Mosquitoes, in the Hawaiian Is-
lands, 140.

Mt. Hillers, 173.

Mt. Tamalpais, 172. :

Mt. Tantalus, Oahu, 123, 128.

Mountains, short-lived, 93-96;
walks in the Hawaiian, 125-130;
a trip to Haleakala, 133-146;
robbing the clouds, 147; a trip to
Kilauea, 149=155,

Mules, at the Grand Cafion, 66, 67.

Murder, among animals, 256.

also

Natural selection. See Selection,
natural.

Nature, as an inventor and experi-
menter, 34, 35; in the tropics, 126;
vast time taken by the processes
of, 199; the ‘‘ gospel” of, 243-273;
and God, 246; teaches more than
she preaches, 247; knowledge and
enjoyment of, 249-251; reason in,
259-262; progresses by trial and
error, 261, 262; intercourse with,
264, 265; largeness of, 266; merci-
less justice of, 271, 272.

Nature-study, 249, 250.

Needles, the, Maui, 129.

Negro, unchanged physically from
ancient times, 190. —-

 

Nevada Falls, 74."
North Dome, 73. 4

Oahu, first sight of, 121; seen from
Haleakala, 143, 144; erosion on,
147,

Oaks, a peculiarity in, 78, 79.

Ohelo berries, 151.

Osborn, Henry Fairfield, 217, 218,
230; quoted, 237.

Over-thrusts, 171, 172.

Paia, 148.

Palzontologist, the, a detective of
the rocks, 214.

Palentology. See Evolution.

Pali, Hawaiian Islands, 129.

Palisades, the, 174.

Palola Valley, a walk up, 125-
128.

Papaya, 124.

Parunuweap Cafion, 62.

Penhallow, Mr., sugar plantation
of, 134.

Petrified Forests, the, 43, 44, 76.

Pheasant, in the Hawaiian Islands,
137.

Pineapple, plantation,
canning-plant, 145.

Punch Bow], Oahu, 123.

144, 145;

Quartz, 108.

Raven, northern (Corvus corax prin-
cipalis), 230.

Religion, on the wane, 195; forms
change but the sentiment persists,
246.

Rice-bird, of the Hawaiian Islands,

127.

Robin, western (Planesticus migra-
torius propinguus), 71, 78.

Rocks, old and young, 96; gene-
alogy of the sedimentary, 98-110;
amount of Archean, 98-101;
chemistry in the growth of, 105-
108; depths of the layers of sedi-
mentary, 107; soil made from,
167, 168; robbed by the waters,
169; formation of the sediment-
ary, 169, 170; over-thrusts in
the, 171,172. .-

278
INDEX

Saint-Gaudens, Augustus, quoted,
268.

Salisbury, R. D. See Chamberlin,
Thomas C.

Salisbury, Robert, Marquis of, 214.

San Francisco, earthquake at, 172.

Science, challenging belief, 175-
186; ties us to the earth, 179; dis-
counts heaven in favor of earth,
179; enlarges the sphere of our
love, 181; atrophies man’s faith
but softens his heart, 195; cannot
give the ultimate explanation,
220; and theology, 263.

Sea, the, mother of the rocks, 109;
illusion of a great blue wall, 130.

Selection, natural, 216.

Senses, delicacy of the, 244, 245."

Sentinel Rock, 75.

Seton, Ernest Thompson, 256, 258.

Shells, and armor, 225.

Shells, Hawaiian, 129, 130.

Sill, 173, 174.

Silver sword, a plant in the crater
of Haleakala, 141.

Skepticism, 264.

Skylark, in “the Hawaiian Islands,
132, 133, 137, 138.

Smell, the sense of, 244.

Soil, the, history of, 14, 15; born of
the rocks, 86; our mother, 167;
its making, 167, 168; cycle of the,
169, 170.

Specialization, in evolution, 229.

Stars, collisions among, 269.

Sugar-making, in the Hawaiian
Islands, 148.

Surf-riding, 131, 132.

Tantalus, Mt., 123, 128.

Tennyson, Alfred, quoted, 96; his
“Parnassus,” 206.

Thalessa, 251, 252.

Theology, and science, 263.

Three Brothers, 73.

 

Thrush, Oahu, 127.

Tiger, sabre-toothed, 229.

Time. See Geologic time.

Titanothere, 230, 237.

Tobacco, its effect on the sense of
smell, 244,

Tree-ferns, 150.

Tropics, nature in the, 126.

Tuscarora Deep, 120.

Variation, in animals and man, 215-
217.
Vernal Falls, 74.

Waikiki, surf-riding at, 131, 132.

Wailuku, 134, 147, 148.

Walking-club, Honolulu, 125.

Walks, in the Hawaiian Islands,
125-130.

Warbler, yellow red-poll, or yellow
palm warbler (Dendroica palma-
rum hypochrysea), 254, 255; notes
of, 255.

Warner, Charles Dudley, quoted,
47.

Water, chemical and mechanical
powers of, 169.

Waterfall, a reversed, 129.

Whately, Richard, 194.

Whitman, Walt, quoted, 79, 197,
202, 213; and evolution, 197.

Whitney, Josiah Dwight, 82.

Woodpecker, northern pileated, or
logeock (Phiwotomus  pileatus
abieticola), 255, 256.

World, end of the, 266, 267.

Wren, cafion (Catherpes mexicanus
conspersus), 70.

Yosemite, its charms, 71, 72; some
of its features, 73-75; contrasted
with the Grand Cafion, 75-78;
oaks in, 78, 79; geology of, 79-83.

Yosemite Falls, 75, 77, 78.
Che Viverside Press
CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS
U.S.A