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Certain phenomena excited his scientific interest very keenly such as the source of the great gas-flare in the village, the rhythmic variations in the air-current, the small but well-marked tides on the sea, the diminished force of gravitation indicating a very great depth, indeed, toward the center of the earth the greater density of the seawater, the heavy vaporization, certain singular rock-strata of the cliffs near the village, and many other matters.
When it was first found, scientists descended into it to examine the exposed rock-strata and learn the history of the Moon before its craters were made. But they found more than history. They found the reason for the colony and the rocket landing field and the shack. The reason for Pop was something else. The shack stood a hundred feet from the Big Crack's edge.
Think, or try to think, of the force of pressure that causes the rock-strata to buckle or crumple or bend layers of rock, thousands of feet thick, made to fold and bend like the leaves of a book vast mountain-chains flexed and foreshortened, or ruptured and faulted as the bending of one's body wrinkles or rips one's clothes.
Again: the dignity of the old written Revelation is not compromised because God has virtually given a further revelation in His works, i.e., by enabling man to know more about the rock-strata and the succession of life on the earth. That is what it really comes to. It should never be forgotten that the book of Nature is a revelation.
Remark, too, that the Character of the Man, nowise without meaning in such a matter, becomes less enigmatic: amid so much tumultuous obscurity, almost like diluted madness, do not a certain indomitable Defiance and yet a boundless Reverence seem to loom forth, as the two mountain-summits, on whose rock-strata all the rest were based and built?
The only way to rescue the "pure bosh" view of the matter is one which has sometimes appealed to my own fancy, but which I imagine few readers will seriously adopt. If, namely, one takes the theory of evolution radically, one ought to apply it not only to the rock-strata, the animals and the plants but to the stars, to the chemical elements, and to the laws of nature.
In the cliffs rock-strata tilted insanely. There were red and yellow and black layers mostly yellow and black. They showed in startlingly clear contrast. "Right!" said Sergeant Madden in morose satisfaction. "I thought there might've been a boat. But this's it!"
Indeed, this same instrument is at present nowise restricted by that condition in Colorado, and is not only, year by year, altering the conformation of all sand and clay bluff's on the Plains, but is tearing down, rebuilding, and fashioning on its facile lathe many rock-strata of the solidity of the more friable grits, wherever exposed to its action.
Goethe collecting fossils and crystals and specimens of rock-strata; Goethe visiting Botanical Gardens and pondering on the Metamorphosis of Plants; Goethe climbing Strassburg Cathedral-Spire; Goethe meeting the Phantom of Himself as he returned from the arms of Frederika; Goethe "experiencing the sensation" of crossing the "Firing-Line"; Goethe "announcing" to Eckermann that that worthy man had better avoid undertaking any "great" literary work; Goethe sending Frau von Stein sausages from his breakfast-table; Goethe consoling himself in the Storm by observing his birth-star Lucifer, and thinking of the Lake of Galilee, are pictures of noble and humorous memory which reconcile one to the Comedy of Living!
Just as the regular succession of rock-strata has been gradually learned, so the regular succession of different fossils is becoming more and more understood.
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