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Lacking the help which the horse gives, it is almost certain that, even now, it could not be maintained. We know the ancient natural history of the horse more completely than that of any other of our domesticated animals. We can trace the steps by which its singularly strong limbs and feet, on which rests its value to man, were formed in the great laboratory of geologic time.
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.
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.
I only wish to state that the work of selection here finds its limit and that centuries and perhaps geologic periods of continued effort in the same direction are not capable of adding anything more to the initial effect. Some illustrative examples may suffice to prove the validity of this assertion.
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.
The pyramids were nearly all made of nummulitic limestone composed of the remains of organic life; a material which belonged to the latest geologic ages, when whole generations and different platforms of life had come and gone.
A glance at a geological map will show that whatever truth there may have been of the actuality of such monsters in the early geologic periods, at least there was plenty of possibility. In England there were originally vast plains where the plentiful supply of water could gather.
The island of Cuba, over more than four-fifths of its surface, is composed of low lands. The soil is covered with secondary and tertiary formations, formed by some rocks of gneiss-granite, syenite and euphotide. The knowledge obtained hitherto of the geologic configuration of the country, is as unsatisfactory as what is known respecting the relative age and nature of the soil.
If, however, the condition of the world, which has obtained throughout geologic time, is but the sequel to a vast series of changes which took place in pre-geologic time, then it seems not unlikely that the duration of this latter is to that of the former as the vast extent of geologic time is to the length of the brief epoch we call the historical period; and that even the oldest rocks are records of an epoch almost infinitely remote from that which could have witnessed the first shaping of our globe.
In many of the caverns in the Peak I am convinced that some of the smaller passages were used in primeval times as the lairs of some of the great serpents of legend and tradition. It may have been that such caverns were formed in the usual geologic way bubbles or flaws in the earth's crust which were later used by the monsters of the period of the young world.
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