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And just as in the present day water continues its busy work above ground of pulling down and building up, so also fire continues its busy work underground of melting rocks which afterwards cool into new forms, and also of shattering and upheaving parts of the earth-crust.
Beneath this crust lies the inner part or kernel of the earth, and no one knows of what it consists; all that can be done is to examine the rocks which rest upon it, and whether the lowest of these layers of rock has yet been reached, we do not know. If you have ever been to a quarry where the rocks have been blasted and cut away, you have seen a little way down into this earth-crust.
Other creations of that marvellous Greek mind might be fitly used to symbolize phases of the present. Hercules might labor now; there are other stables than the Augean; and not yet are all Hydras slain. Armor is needed; and a Vulcan spirit is making the anvil ring beneath the earth-crust of humanity.
The earth-crust is a scene of perpetual change, of perpetual struggle, of perpetual building up, of perpetual wearing away. The work may go on slowly, but it does go on.
Although the fivefold division of Werner, by which he separated the rocks into Primitive, Transition, Secondary, Alluvial, and Volcanic, proved to be based on a partial misapprehension of the nature of the earth-crust, yet it led to their subsequent division into the three great groups now known as the Primary, or Palaeozoic, as they are sometimes called, because here are found the first organic remains, the Secondary, and the Tertiary.
These, with many more, not so common, make up the remaining quarter of the earth-crust. Carbon plays as important a part in animal and vegetable life as silicon in rocks. Carbon is most commonly seen in three distinct forms as charcoal, as black-lead, and as the pure brilliant diamond.
I felt the joy of the pioneer felt the sweet sense of delving in the mother earth. It touched in me some responsive chord that harked back to my ancestors who broke the rocky soil of New England. Of the life of my fellows bustling by on the earth-crust overhead those fellows of whom so lately I had been one I was not at all conscious.
Just such a tilting or upheaval has taken place again and again with the rocks forming our earth-crust. The edges of the lower rocks often show side by side with those of higher layers. But geologists know them apart. They are able to tell confidently whether such and such a rock, peeping out at the earth's surface, belongs really to a lower or a higher kind.
Although I have stated that one general character prevailed during each of the Ages, yet there was nevertheless a constant progressive action running through them all, and at various intervals both the organic and the physical world received a sudden impulse in consequence of marked and violent changes in the earth-crust, bringing up new elevations, while at the same time the existing animal creation was brought to a close, and a new set of beings was introduced.
Trinidad seems to have had its full share of those later disturbances of the earth-crust, which carried tertiary strata up along the shoulders of the Alps; which upheaved the chalk of the Isle of Wight, setting the tertiary beds of Alum Bay upright against it; which even, after the Age of Ice, thrust up the Isle of Moen in Denmark and the Isle of Ely in Cambridgeshire, entangling the boulder clay among the chalk how long ago?
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