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Time and Change

by John Burroughs · English · Gutenberg #5706 · 391,454 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Time and Change

Author: John Burroughs


        
Release date: May 1, 2004 [eBook #5706]
                Most recently updated: December 29, 2020

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TIME AND CHANGE ***




Produced by Charles Aldarondo




TIME AND CHANGE

BY

JOHN BURROUGHS

BOSTON AND NEW YORK

1912






PREFACE





I 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 collection than of
spiritual and aesthetic 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 degree 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 the
evidences of immense time that looked out from their gray and
crumbling fronts. I was in the presence 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 appearance of new species from age to age. The biologic 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 animal 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 thinking which I have gone through in
accepting this doctrine. I am aware that there is much repetition 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





I. THE LONG ROAD

II. THE DIVINE ABYSS

III. THE SPELL OF THE YOSEMITE

IV. THROUGH THE EYES OF THE GEOLOGIST

V. HOLIDAYS IN HAWAII

VI. THE OLD ICE FLOOD

VII. THE FRIENDLY SOIL

VIII. PRIMAL ENERGIES

IX. SCIENTIFIC FAITH

X. "THE WORM STRIVING TO BE MAN"

XI. THE PHANTOMS BEHIND US

XII. THE HAZARDS OF THE PAST

XIII. THE GOSPEL OF NATURE






TIME AND CHANGE

I

THE LONG ROAD

I





The 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 unicellular 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 warrings 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 Dawson, long after Darwin had launched
his revolutionary 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 to a revelation, 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 omnipresent Creator. But there is no help for it.
Science 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 evolution 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 directing our attention to common near-at-hand facts for the
key to remote and mysterious occurrences.

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 sequence of natural causation. That
man should have been brought into existence by the fiat of an
omnipotent 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 impulse 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 amphibian and reptile, through
swimming and creeping and climbing things, and that the forms that
conveyed it should have escaped the devouring monsters 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 everywhere operative about us, by
showing us that these processes are the channels through which the
creative 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.

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 zoological
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
supernatural 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,
described 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?

If we once seriously undertake to solve the riddle of man's origin,
and go back along the line of his descent, 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
begins. Even the first dawn of protozoic life in the primordial 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 fetus, and that the fetus 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 complex. It is the order of our
own thoughts, our own arts, our own civilization, our own language.

In our candid moments we acknowledge the animal 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 creature 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, myriads 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 conscious
purpose as the thorns, the stings, the hooks, the coils, and the
wings in the vegetable world, making 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
powers, 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 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
prodigious 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,--instinct giving birth to reason, animal ferocity
developing 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 mundane 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 during which it has
been at work. It is as impossible for us to grasp geological time as
sidereal space. All the standards of measurement furnished us by
experience 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 before 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 disintegrated mountains--can we figure that time
to ourselves? 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 pulverized 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
river valleys and gorges--cut a mile deep in the Colorado canyon,
and yet this canyon is but of yesterday 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, duration,--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 matter 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 crystals 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 rock, 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 otherwise 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 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, starting 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 resulted in the laying
down of the coal measures.

An eternity to man is but a day in the cosmic process. 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 hundred 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 witnessed 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.

In nature as a whole we see results and not processes. 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.

A recent biologist and physicist thinks, and doubtless 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 conditions 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 compounds, 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
brooding seems to have gone on, was probably as long as all the ages
since.

How we are baffled when we talk about the beginning 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 language 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 gradation 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 approximating 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 began his existence
seems to me misleading, because 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 appeared, 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 geologic
periods before you reach the not-man. If Darwin 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 introduced.




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
subsidence--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 verdure, 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 differentiated and their complex water-systems
established 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 organized. 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 elements
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, carbon, 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 mountains, 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-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 filtered and
used and precipitated by countless forms of marine life, making a
sediment that in time became 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 intimate and cooperative
all parts of the universe are with one another,--of the debt we owe
to the farthest stars, and to the remotest period of time. We must
owe a debt to the monsters of Mesozoic and Caenozoic 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 currents. 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 apprenticeship; they had
gained proficiency and were master 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 experience in organization, at last made the
problem of the origin of man easier to solve?

One fancies every living thing as not only returning 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 enlarge, 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 functions. 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 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 scorpions, a
cephalopod larger than a man; then gigantic fishes and amphibians
and reptiles, followed by enormous mammals. But the geologic record
shows that these huge forms did not continue. The mollusks 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 geologic 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 increase 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 Pliocene 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
law of steady increase in size has been operative, as seen in the
Felidae, 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 reversed, and the huge treelike
club-mosses and horsetails 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.




III



Can we fail to see the significance of the order in which life has
appeared upon the globe--the ascending series from the simple to the
more and more complex? Can we doubt that each series is the outcome
of the one below it--that there is a logical sequence from the
protozoa up through the invertebrates, 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 nature? Is there no fundamental
reason for the gradation 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, succeeding one another, as Cope says, in the
relative order of their zoological 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 amphibian follows the
fish, the reptile follows the amphibian, 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 Leptocardii; 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
vertebral 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 congeries of
cells, which is followed by congeries of congeries of cells, till
the highly complex structure of the grown animal with all its
intricate physiological activities and specialization of parts, is
reached. It 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 preceding stage.

How slowly and surely the 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 display 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 primitive 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 suspension of the lower jaw, so as to bring the teeth nearer the
power,--the masseter and related muscles,--was a slow evolution and
a great advance. The fin is more primitive than the limb; the limbs
themselves display a constantly increasing differentiation of parts
from the batrachian to the mammalian. 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 Eocene 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 progressed 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 became
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
divisions or seasons, primary, secondary, tertiary, and quaternary,
the fishes fall in the primary, the reptiles in the secondary, the
mammals in the tertiary, 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, 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 millions 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 evidently to be upon
mental and spiritual lines. Nature, 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 probably 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?

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 the 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 deepened and mellowed, its harsher features
have softened, 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.




V



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
capable of motion long before it had limbs; it assimilated 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 bisexual; 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 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 began 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 creation
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 following 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 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 Palaeozoic 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 Caenozoic 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 placenta, was
hit upon in this age, and probably the diaphragm and the brain of
animals, all greatly enlarged. Finally comes the Anthropozoic or
Quaternary 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 Palaeozoic, Mesozoic, and Caenozoic 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 gigantic forms upon the land and in the
air, all that rising and sinking of the continents, and all that
shoveling to and fro and mixing of the soils, before the world was
ready for him.

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
serviceable 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 developed 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 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 advantages 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 appeared, that the first zoophyte furthered our
fortunes, that the first worm gave us a lift. Great good luck came
to us when the first pair of eyes were invented, probably by the
trilobite back in Silurian times; when the first ear appeared,
probably in 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, probably with the first warm-blooded animal in Mesozoic
times.

These humble forms started the brain, the nervous 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 forebears, 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 below 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 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 contend 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 carnival 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 out the
element of time and we have before us a spectacle more novel and
startling than any hocus-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 dipnoans,
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 superfluous
forty-four teeth with his ancestral quadrumana of Eocene times, and
kept thirty-two. He picked up his brain somewhere on the road,
probably far back in Palaeozoic times, but how has he developed and
enlarged it, till it is now the one supreme thing in the world! His
fear, his cunning, his anger, his treachery, his hoggishness--all
his animal passions--he brought with him from his animal ancestors;
but his moral and spiritual nature, his altruism, his veneration,
his religious emotions, his aesthetic perceptions--have come to him
as a man, supplementing his lower nature, as it were, 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 preexisting
potentialities. The father 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 ancestor had left the imprint of his four feet. He was
evidently 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 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 vestiges of one hundred and
eighty organs which have stuck to us from our animal ancestors,--now
useless, or often worse than useless, like the vermiform appendix.
Eleven of these superannuated and obsolete organs we bring from the
fishes, four from amphibians and reptiles. The external ear is a
vestige--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, keeping step, no doubt, with the
amelioration of the soil out of which all life finally comes. Life's
bank account 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 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 mammary 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, taking a forward step
only when compelled by necessity,--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 backbone 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 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,--cooperation,
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
combinations of cells, then combinations of combinations, then more
and more complex combinations till the body of man is reached, where
endless confraternities of cells, all with different functions,
working to build and sustain different organs,--brain, heart,
liver, muscles, nerves,--yet all working 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 organization 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 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 aeons 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 Mediterranean,
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 progress. Their
exceptional minds or characters do not lead the tribes to higher
planes of thought, In all countries we still see these barbarous
people which man in his progress has left behind. Our civilization
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 successive 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 unsolved.

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 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 being 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 fortuitous
variation--variation all around the circle--could have resulted in
the evolution of man. There must have been a predetermined tendency
to variation 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 direction, 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 anthropomorphism which we cannot escape from, no
matter how deep we dive or high we soar.






II

THE DIVINE ABYSS

I





In 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 in 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 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 mountains, 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
quarrymen. But other workmen, invisible to our eyes, have carved
these jagged edges into novel and beautiful forms.

The East is old, old! the West, with the exception of the Rocky
Mountains, is of yesterday in comparison. 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 England
in comparison is an octogenarian. Just as much 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 Tertiary 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 geology of the West, for
I really have little first-hand knowledge upon that subject, but I
would indicate the kind of interest in the country I was most
conscious 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 canyons; both cliffs
and soil have canyon 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 canyon form seems inherent in soil and rock. The
channels of the little streams are canyons, vertical sides of adobe
soil, as deep as they are broad, rectangle grooves in the ground.

Through all this arid region nature is abrupt, angular, and
sudden--the plain squarely abutting the cliff, the cliff walling the
canon; the dry water-course 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 she long 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 tablelike 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 Arizona 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
deserted camp, or one upon which the silence of death had fallen.
Here, in Carboniferous times, grew the gigantic fern-like trees, the
Sigillaria and Lepidodendron, whose petrified trunks, for aeons
buried beneath the deposit of the Permian seas, and then, during
other aeons, slowly uncovered by the gentle action of the eroding
rains, we saw scattered on the ground.

You first see Nature beginning to form the canon habit in Colorado
and making preliminary studies for her masterpiece, the Grand
Canon. 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 adorning their vertical sides. In the railway cuts you
see the same effects--miniature domes and turrets and other canon
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
approximately 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 canon turned bottom
side up, as it were. In New Mexico, the canon habit of the erosion
forces is still more pronounced. The mountain-lines are often as
architectural in the distance, or arbitrary, 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 facades, 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
unfinished, 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 mountains,--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.




II



Hence it is that when one reaches the Grand canon 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 Canon. 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 stupendous 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 reverential emotions is equally easy;
is, indeed, almost inevitable. The immensity of the scene, its
tranquillity, 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
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 afterward told
me I know it was not from terror or sorrow, but from the
overpowering gladness of the ineffable 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 desperate 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 experienced 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. 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 sympathize with the remark of an old
woman visitor who is reported to have said that she thought they had
built the canon too near the hotel. The enormous cleavage which the
canon 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 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 perspective, vast and alluring, takes its
place; another heaven, 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 transfiguration 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 terrified by its strangeness and power, he must have stood
long, awed, spellbound, speechless with astonishment, and thrilled
with delight. He may have seen vast and glorious prospects from
mountaintops, he may have looked down upon the earth and seen it
unroll like a map before him; but he had never before looked into
the earth as through a mighty window 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 mountain-summits, but
with a wealth of color and a suggestion of architectural and
monumental remains, and a strange, almost unearthly beauty, such as
no mountain-view could ever have afforded him. Three features of the
canon strike one at once: its unparalleled magnitude, its
architectural forms and 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 hundred 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 suggestions of the canon, which must
play a prominent part in all faithful attempts to describe it. There
are huge, truncated towers, vast, horizontal mouldings; 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 seeing wrought by the blind
forces of nature. These forces have here foreshadowed all the
noblest architecture of the world. Many of the vast carved and
ornamental masses which diversify the canon 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 Pyramid of Cheops. Farther to the
east is the Diva Temple, 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 Dutton,
"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 canyon. The
color-scheme runs from the dark, sombre hue of the gneiss at the
bottom, up through the yellowish 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 canyon 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 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 canyon 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 disintegrated
red sandstone, like a mass of brick dust on the top where the
fragment of the old red wall made 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 debris 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 except 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 temples 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 plateaus. Their outlines now stand out like skeletons
from which the flesh has been removed--sharp, angular, obtrusive,
but bound together as by ligaments 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 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 accounted 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 beneath
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 architectural 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 alternating, but with the
vertical jointing less pronounced; hence the Catskills have few
canon-like valleys, though there are here and there huge gashes
through the mountains that give a canon effect, and there are
gigantic walls high up on the face of some of the mountains that
suggest one side of a mighty canon. 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 natural 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 canon is its
cleanness--its freedom from debris. 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 degradation 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
contains, 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-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 canyon 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 difficulty 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 canyon 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 masonry,
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 themselves
everywhere, and give that look of repose and security characteristic
of the scene. The rocky forces always seem to retreat in good order
before the onslaught of time; there is neither rout nor confusion;
everywhere they present a calm upright 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 nature--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 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 thousand 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 canyon is only of yesterday in
geologic time,--the Middle Tertiary,--and yet behold the duration of
that yesterday 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 sculpturing--the air,
the rains, the frost, the sunshine--are as active now as they ever
were; but their activity 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
disappear, 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 architectural forms would have crumbled long ago, and fertile
fields or hill-slopes would have taken their place. In the older
Hawaiian Islands, which probably also date from Tertiary times, the
rains have carved enormous canons and amphitheatres out of the hard
volcanic rock, in some places grinding the mountains to such a thin
edge that a man may literally sit astride them, each leg pointing
into opposite valleys. In the next geologic age, the temples and
monuments of the Grand Canon 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 mountain, 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
canon for twenty-six years, said, "While we have been sitting here,
the canon has widened and deepened"; which was, of course, the
literal truth, the mathematical truth, but the widening and
deepening could not have been apprehended 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 human history is so brief. So far as we are
concerned, the gods of the earth sit in council behind closed 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
transcend 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
earthquakes or volcanic eruptions, is their dreamless slumber rudely
disturbed.

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

Starting from the high plateau of Utah, and going south toward the
canon, we descend a grand geologic 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 Jurassic, the Triassic, the
Permian, to the Carboniferous, which is the bottom or landing of the
Grand Canon 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 pattern and dimension, "giving the effect," says Major
Dutton, "of a gigantic colonnade from which the entablature has been
removed or has fallen in ruins."

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 sandstone 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 canon itself is carved. Now, all these various
strata above the canon, making at one time a thickness of over a
mile, were worn away in Pliocene times, before the cutting of the
Grand Canon 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 downward 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. 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 down, and one is naturally incredulous as to their
destructive effects.

Some of the smaller rivers in the plateau region flow in very deep
but very narrow canons. 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 Parunuweap Canon 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 canon 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 canon 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 subaerial forces have been at work to account for it.

Two forces, or kinds of forces, have worked together in excavating
the canon: 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 downward, 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 canon 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 laterally have been more continuously active than has 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 practically 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 chemical 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 canon, 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 canon 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 older than
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
Palaeozoic time, or to the spring of the great geologic year, while
the canon 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 canon stage long before the Grand Canon
was born. We have had all that experience, and have forgotten it
ages ago. No vestiges of our canons 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 aeons before that event. When the
Grand Canon 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 canon 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 canon 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 "Johnny's" stood between me
and a tumble of two or three thousand feet. How cautiously he felt
his 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 descent 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, looking
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 Cambrian soil. Hence a new experience was promised me.
Rocky layers probably two or three miles thick had been worn away
from the old Cambrian foundations, 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 thousand feet. We found it gravelly and desert-like,
covered 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 Archaean 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 carefully the level strata had been fitted to the
shapeless mass beneath it! It all looked like 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 creation. 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 uniformitarianism, 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 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 excavating the canon, 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 canon 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
magnitude 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 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 Indian Gardens was planting his garden. Here I heard the
song of the canon 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 Canon.






III

THE SPELL OF THE YOSEMITE

I





Yosemite 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 my 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 seclusion 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 boulders 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 the spell of the brooding
calm and sheltered seclusion that pervades it. You pass suddenly
from the tumultuous, the chaotic, into the ordered, the tranquil,
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 granite
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 architectural, or like something
builded, but like the sides and the four corners of the globe
itself. What an impression of mass and of power and of grandeur in
repose filters into you as you walk along! El Capitan 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 valley, 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 enormous 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 peel off in concentric sheets, their forms are
preserved.




II



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
struggling with the wreck of huge granite cliffs: so impassive and
immobile the rocks, so impetuous and reckless 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
merciless 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 melting 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 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 Yosemite can stand the broad,
searching light of midday 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.




III



Going from the Grand Canon to Yosemite is going from one sublimity
to another of a different order. The canon 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 grand and austere. But I do not
think one could ever feel at home in or near the Grand Canon; 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 thousands
of gigantic trees or tree ferns, that grew millions 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 canon 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 Canon is
carved out of one of the most beautiful, but perishable, red
Carboniferous sandstone and limestone. There is a maze of beautiful
and intricate lines in the latter, a wilderness of temple-like forms
and monumental remains, and noble architectural profiles that
delight while they bewilder the eye. Yosemite has much greater
simplicity, and is much nearer the classic standard of beauty. Its
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 vertical 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 inclosed 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 hundred 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 inspect the hidden recess in which this
airy spirit again took on a more tangible form of still, running
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 foot
of the fall. At first I was surprised at the volume of water that
came hurrying out of the hidden recess of dripping rocks and
trees--a swiftly flowing stream, thirty or forty feet wide, and four
or five feet deep. How could that comparatively narrow 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 relaxed. 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 Canon 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 Canon! 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 [Footnote: I have since observed the same trait in the
oaks in Georgia--probably a characteristic of this tree in southern
latitudes.]--a fluid or outflowing condition of the growth
aboveground, such as one usually sees in the roots of trees--so that
it tended to envelop 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 omnivorous 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 vertical, 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, occupying
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 been a 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 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 anywhere 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 extraordinary agents or
world-building forces. It is as surprising 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. Demons and furies might lurk in the valley below, but
here is the abode of the serene, beneficent Olympian deities. All is
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 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 tremendous
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 features 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 approximates 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 excavate.
The valley of the Merced from the mouth of Yosemite downward is an
open valley strewn with huge angular granite rocks and shows no
signs of glaciation whatever. The reason of this abruptness is quite
beyond my ken. It is to me a 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 topography of
the land. Not to the thunder or the lightning, 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 hundred, to account for the
configuration of the continents.

The geologists of our day, while not agreeing as to the amount of
work done respectively by ice and water, yet agree that to the
latter the larger proportion 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

I





How 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
ancestors, 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.

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 know that it was not made at all,
in the mechanical sense, but that it grew--that it is 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,
ameliorating from cycle to cycle, mellowing, coloring,
sweetening--why, such a revelation adds immensely 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 geologic 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 aeon of
geologic and astronomic 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 imagination 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 of the earth beneath, and bodying
forth a veritable history, a warring of the powers of light and
darkness, with the triumph of the angels of light and life, makes
Milton's picture seem hollow and unreal. The creative and poetic
imagination has undoubtedly already reached its high-water mark. We
shall probably never see the great imaginative works of the past
surpassed or even 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 geologic 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 palaeontologist has a much narrower field to work
in, and the background 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 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 continents by
the ocean, which have gone on from Archaean 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 affirmations are inspired by a study of
the features of the earth about him; his time is not our time, his
horizons 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 continent printed across
it. If the geologist did not tell us, how should we ever suspect
that probably 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 mountains 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 upon his native hills
and see them as they were incalculable 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 erosion 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 sees their shadow
forms wherever he looks. He follows out the lines of the flexed or
folded strata where they come to the surface, 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
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
withstood 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 reelevated 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. They are immeasurably old, but they do not look it,
except to the eye of the geologist. There is nothing 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 flowing lines of youth, coming down to us from the fore-
world of Palaeozoic time, yet only rounded and mellowed by the aeons
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, 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 stratified 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
Archaean rock are not. Moreover, strata of unequal hardness are
exposed, and this condition favors rapid erosion.

In imagination the geologist is present at the birth of whole
mountain-ranges. He sees them gestating in the womb of their mother,
the sea. Where our great Appalachian range now stands, he sees, in
the great interior sea of Palaeozoic 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 takes on new wrinkles. Just
why the earth's crust should wrinkle along lines of rock of such
enormous thickness is not a little 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 internal 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 human 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 scratching and gashing the surface of the globe,
would make 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.




II



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 Archaean 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 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 is not 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
completely. 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,
     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 remember once hearing him say that
his teacher in such matters as I am here touching upon was Agassiz,
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 another face."




III



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
Archaean rocks in detached lines and masses, rising here and there
above the primordial ocean; a large triangular mass in Canada, and
two broken lines of smaller masses running 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
prodigious 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 Archaean
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
Archaean 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,
and, to account for the forty thousand feet of sediment deposited in
Palaeozoic times in the region of the Appalachians, he presupposes a
neighboring continent to the east, probably formed of Laurentian
rocks, where now rolls the Atlantic. But if such a continent once
existed, would not some vestige of it still remain? The fact that no
trace of it as been found, it seems to me, invalidates Lyell's
theory.

Archaean time in geologic history answers to pre-historic time in
human history; all is dark and uncertain, 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 supposed, 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 primary or igneous rocks,
where they did appear, were sufficiently elevated to have furnished
through erosion the all but incalculable amount of material that
went to the making of our vast land areas. But the geologists give
me the impression that this is what we are to believe.

Chamberlin and Salisbury, in their recent college 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 surface to-day then there was
in Archaean 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 Devonian 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 Archaean times stretched from the rudimentary
Appalachian Mountains to the rudimentary 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 major part in the
genealogy of the subsequent stratified 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
seabottom 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 framework 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 granite 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
deposit.

But the curious thing about it all is the enormous progeny from so
small a beginning; the rocks seem really to have grown and
multiplied like organic 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
Archaean Adam, his head and chest in Canada, his two unequal legs
running, one down the Pacific coast, and one down the Atlantic
Coast, and from his loins, we are told, all the progeny of rocks and
soils that make up the continent have sprung, one generation
succeeding another 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 geologists call it,
seems to have been fermenting and laboring for untold aeons 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
degenerates, 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 the
rock eroded. Nearly all the wonderful and beautiful sculpturing of
the rocks in the West and Southwest is in rocks of comparatively
recent date.

Can we say that all the organic matter of our time is from
preexisting organic matter? one organism torn down to build up
another? that the beginning of the series was as great as the end?
There may have been as much matter in a state of vital organization
in Carboniferous or in Cretaceous times as in our own, but there is
certainly more now than in early Palaeozoic 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 preexisting
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 the contrary, 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? In
a parallel manner has there been a gain in the bulk of the secondary
rocks through the action of the world-building forces directed to
the sea, the air, and the preexisting 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 at one time in the
original granite, or in the primordial 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
preexisting material, as much so as the growth of a plant or a tree
or an animal. The color and texture 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 examine, the greater are the
changes which the sedimentary deposits have undergone." Above all
have chemical processes produced changes. This constant passage of
the mineral elements of the rocks through the cycle of erosion,
sedimentation, and reinduration 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 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 oxidation and carbonation are also expansive processes.
Whether any of this gain in volume is lost in the process 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 the tides and the ocean-currents, which
were probably much more powerful in early than in late geologic
times, and to submarine mineral springs and volcanic eruptions of
ashes and mud, admits of little doubt. That it owes much to
extra-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 matter held
in solution by the primordial seas must have been enormous. The
amount of rock laid down in Palaeozoic 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 know a
period quite as long, amounts to eight thousand feet, indicating, it
seems to me, that the deposition of sediment went on much more
rapidly in early geologic times. We are nearer the beginning of
things. All chemical processes in the earth's crust were probably
more rapid. Doubtless the rainfall was more, but the land areas must
have been less. The greater amount of carbon dioxide in the air
during Palaeozoic times would have favored more rapid carbonation.
When granite is dissolved by weathering, 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 unchanged 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 sedimentary 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.

If the original granite is the father of the rocks, the sea is the
mother. In her womb they were gestated and formed. Had not this
seesaw of land and ocean taken place, there could have been no
continental 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
evolution 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
England, seem never to have taken this plunge, except an area about
Lake Superior which geologists say has gone down four or five times.
The Laurentian 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 between 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 extent, 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 Palaeozoic 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 invasions 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 Europe,
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 Archaean 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.

It is very interesting to me to know that in Colorado 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 association, 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 discover 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
past, we might have had the same impression, so tranquil, for the
most part, has been the earth's history, so slow and rhythmical have
been the beats of the great clock of time. We see this in the
homogeneity 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 anywhere. The bedding-planes of many kinds of rock occur at
as regular intervals as if they had been determined 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 workmen, 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 snowbank, or as the ice on a mountain lake; grain upon grain,
all from the same source in each case, and sifted and sorted by the
same agents, and the finished product as uniform in color and
quality as the output of some great mill.

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 lain idle for a long
period, and when it has resumed, a different product is the result.
Something 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 deformation and upheaval were more frequent, yet had
we lived in any of those periods we should probably have found the
course of nature, certainly when measured by human generations, as
even and tranquil 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 Tertiary
time, and at the end of the Palaeozoic period. Yet the vast
stretches of time between were evidently 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
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 hundreds 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; 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 revolutions 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
catastrophe, 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 the end of Palaeozoic time--how many
millions of years is only conjectural--the truce of aeons 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 unprecedented
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-bottom, 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 Palaeozoic and Mesozoic 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 approximately 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 has its root in that which preceded
it. There were rude, half-defined fishes in 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
Jike 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
algae 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
evolution is at work, and life always rises on stepping-stones of
its dead self to higher things.






V

HOLIDAYS IN HAWAII

I





On 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 wilderness
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 traveler steaming
toward them, and on the rim of the world they lie in his memory
after his return, basking 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 Pacific, fire-born and rain-carved, vast
volcanic mountains miles deep under the sea, and in some cases miles
high above it, clothed with verdure and teeming 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 pleasure.
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 agreeable
experience. The first day's run must have carried 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 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 familiar in outline, but the colors of the
landscape, the soft lilacs, greens, and browns, and the whole
atmosphere of the scene, were unlike anything we had ever before
seen. And Diamond Head, what a feature 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, in
the soft morning air, 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 surrounded 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, excellent fire protection, mountain water,
libraries, parks, handsome buildings, attractive homes,--in fact,
all that we boast of in our home cities. Embosomed in 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
forests and fertile fields, and a huge ancient crater called the
Punch Bowl, born probably on the selfsame day, the geologists think,
as Diamond Head, dominates the city in the immediate foreground. If
the Punch Bowl 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 population cuts only a small
figure. The real workers--carpenters, masons, field hands, and
house servants--are mostly Japanese. Virtually all the work of the
immense sugar plantations is done by the little brown men and women,
while China supplies some of the merchants in the city and the
sailors 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, perfumed 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 descendants of the
missionaries who went out from New England and New York early in the
last century, and one feels at home with them at once. Many of the
residents there have been educated in the States. The Governor, Mr.
Frear, is a graduate 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 adjoining 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 mountains. These walkers in
unfrequented places proved to be real walkers, and gave us all and
more than we had bargained for--more mud and wet and slippery trails
through clinging vines and rank lantana 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 highway, 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 mountain climb I never undertook. The vegetation was
all novel, but it had that barbaric rankness of all tropical 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 somersaults, it makes itself into loops and
rings, it rolls, 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 below 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 beneath us,
and which is supposed to have been an ancient crater. There, on the
brink, the walkers had 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 bedraggled, 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 Tantalus, 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 uncomfortable. 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 hundred 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 other to the other.
This is a feature of a new country geologically; the rains and other
agents of erosion 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, going 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 summary way the water it has brought them.

On the walk with the Governor we made the acquaintance of some of
the land shells for which these 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 delightful. Your clothing dries very quickly, and chilliness
gives place to genial warmth. And the prospects that open before
you, the glimpses down into these deep, yellow-green, crater-like
valleys, checkered with neat little Chinese farms, the panorama 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 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 oarsmen 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 sensation 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 for the sensation 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
with it. The native 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 European 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,
drifting 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 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 voyage 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
undisturbed. A wireless message had gone to Mr. Aiken, on the island
of Maui, to meet us with his automobile 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 canyoned 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 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
entertained 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 afterward 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 mountain 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 a trail 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 over and 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 valley, 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
distance. 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 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 responsive 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 in the clouds. At Idlewild our expedition, consisting 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 skylarks were singing. This was one of the
happy surprises of the trip--the soaring and singing skylarks. 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 memories of home.

Before we reached the summit we came upon another 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-crazy
by it, as their sunken eyes and poor condition plainly showed.

The trail became rougher and steeper as we ascended, 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 texture 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 summit 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
floating 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 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
volcano, 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 outlines 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 surface 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 to act. They are of the shape of huge haystacks, with a hole
in the top, and looked soft and yielding in outline, and in color as
though 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 hundred," 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 secondary
craters of the centre. Vegetation was also climbing down the ragged
sides of the crater, dropping 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 decomposed
and ripened by time, it makes a red, heavy soil that supports many
kinds of plants and trees.

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
apparition, 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 demons 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 to a soft, silvery down. We did not see the
plant growing 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 the heavens 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 fading stars. As we had seen the day pass into
night, surrounded by these wonderful scenes, now we saw 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 picking 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
everywhere.

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 ourselves 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 in the horizon marked the place of
Oahu. The ocean rose in the vast horizon and blended with the sky.
The eye 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 constant
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 Idlewild, 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 farming 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
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