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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.
"They talk about their Atlantises, their submerged continents!" he exclaimed, with a sniff through his wide, hairy nostrils. "Why, Trednoke, do you realize that we are living literally at the bottom of a Mesozoic at any rate, Cenozoic sea?" The gentleman thus indignantly addressed contemplated his questioner with the serenity of one conscious of freedom from geologic responsibility.
The remotest star that shines has sent a ray that has entered into his life. All things are under his feet, and the keys of the heavens are in his hands. One would fain arrive at some concrete belief or image of his line of descent in geologic time as he does in the historic period. But how hard it is to do so!
The animal brain began to increase in size in Tertiary times, and seems to have done so suddenly, but the geologic ages were so long that a change in one hundred thousand years would seem sudden. "The brains of some species increase one hundred per cent." The mammal brain greatly outstripped the reptile brain. Was Nature getting ready for man?
The sides of these barren masses, seamed by the action of water in remote geologic ages, and never softened or smoothed by the gentle attrition of rain, were infinitely more wild and jagged in their details than ruins. It seemed as if the Titans had built here, and their works had been shattered by thunderbolts.
Come down the stream of time several millions of years to our own geologic age and we find the earth swarming with the human species like an ant-hill with ants, and with a vast number of forms not found in the Mesozoic era; and the men are doing to a large part of the earth what the ants do to a square rod of its surface. Where did they come from?
In New Hanover, New Cornwall and New Norfolk these rents of a rocky coast are repeated, these geologic phenomena of the fjords that characterize western Patagonia and Norway.
And starting from the simplest kinds, such as the Poduras, Spiders, Grasshoppers and May flies, allied creatures which we now know were the first to appear in the earlier geologic ages, we rise to the highest, the bees with their complex forms, their diversified economy and wonderful instincts.
The molten rock which has been driven from the earth's interior to within the crust or to the surface during geologic time must be reckoned in millions of cubic miles. The problems of volcanoes and of deformation are so closely connected with that of the earth's interior that we may consider them together.
Without my soils and moisture and warmth, without my carbon and oxygen and nitrogen and hydrogen, you can do or be nothing; without my sunshine you perish; but you have these things on condition of effort and struggle. You have evolution on condition of pain and failure and the hazard of the warring geologic ages. Fate and necessity rule in my realm.
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