“ Tens of millions are ever coming into existence, living out their tiny lives, dying, and sinking to the bottom.
There upon the ocean-floor gather their remains, a heaped-up multitude of minute skeletons or shells, layer forming over layer.
It was long suspected that the white chalk cliffs of England were built up in some such manner as this through past ages. And now at length proof has been found, in the shape of mud dredged up from the ocean-bottom—mud entirely composed of countless multitudes of these little shells, dropping there by myriads, and becoming slowly joined together in one mass. ”

“ The sea is always fighting against the land, beating down her cliffs, eating into her shores, swallowing bit by bit of solid earth; and rain and frost and inland streams are always busily at work, helping the ocean in her work of destruction. Year by year and century by century it continues. Not a country in the world which is bordered by the open sea has precisely the same coast-line that it had one hundred years ago; not a land in the world but parts each century with masses of its material, washed piecemeal away into the ocean. ”

“ Men have lived on the earth for hundreds of thousands of years; and its wonders have increased, not diminished, with their experience.
To our barbarous ancestors of centuries ago, all was mystery—the thunder, the rainbow, the growing corn, the ocean, the stars. Gradually and by slow steps they learned to house themselves in trees, in caves, in huts, in houses; to find a sure supply of food; to provide a stock of serviceable clothing. The arts of life were born; tools were invented; the priceless boon of fire was received; tribes and clans united for defence ”

“ The night grows dark, the wind rises and is cold, and the tide changes; so does the luminosity of the sea. The pale spectres below the surface sink deeper, and are lost to sight, but the increasing waves are tinged here and there with green and white, and often along a line, where the fresh water is mixing with the salt in an estuary, there is a brightness so intense that boats and shores are visible.... ”

“ When a lad hears for the first time that an astronomer, by a simple pointing of his spectroscope, can determine with what velocity a star is approaching the earth, or receding from it, or when he hears that the very shape of the revolving masses of certain stars can be calculated from simple measures of the sort, he is apt to conclude that Science, which has made such astounding advances since the days of Galileo and Newton, must eventually reach a complete explanation of the entire universe. ”

“ We should then be able to view our earth through the successive epochs of past geological time; we should be actually able to see those great animals whose fossil remains are treasured in our museums tramping about over the earth's surface, splashing across its swamps, or swimming with broad flippers through its oceans. Indeed, if we could view our own earth reflected from mirrors in the stars, we might still see Moses crossing the Red Sea, or Adam and Eve being expelled from Eden. ”

“ In this, as in so many other things, we are but "children of a larger growth." The world is the geologist's great puzzle-box; he stands before it like the child to whom the separate pieces of his puzzle remain a mystery till he detects their relation and sees where they fit, and then his fragments grow at once into a connected picture beneath his hand.... ”

“ There can be no other star in the neighborhood adequate to the purpose, for, of course, such an object would be brilliant to us if it were large enough and bright enough to impart sufficient illumination to the nebula. It would be absurd to say that you could see a man's face by the light of a candle while the candle itself was too faint or too distant to be visible. ”

“ The Stars are Suns.
We are about to discuss one of the grandest truths in the whole of nature. We have had occasion to see that this sun of ours is a magnificent globe immensely larger than the greatest of his planets, while the greatest of these planets is immensely larger than this earth; but now we are to learn that our sun is, indeed, only a star not nearly so bright as many of those which shine over our heads every night. ”

“ That curious inquiry was the birth of Science. Art was born when some far-away ancestor, in an idle hour, [pg xiv] scratched on a bone the drawing of two of his reindeer fighting, or carved on the walls of his cave the image of the mammoth that he had but lately slain with his spear and arrows.
In a mind that is completely ignorant there is no wonder. Wonder is the child of knowledge—of partial and imperfect knowledge, to be sure, but still, of knowledge. The very first step in Science is to make an inventory of external Nature (and by and by of the faculties of the mind that thinks) . ”

“ When we examine the Milky Way with a telescope we find, to our amazement, that it consists of myriads of stars, so small and so faint that we are not able to distinguish them individually; we merely see the glow produced from their collective rays. Remembering that our sun is a star, and that the Milky Way surrounds us, it would almost seem as if our sun were but one of the host of stars which form this cluster. ”

“ From artesian wells, from mines, from geysers, from hot springs, a mass of facts has been collected, proving incontestably the heated condition of all substances at a certain depth below the earth's surface; and if we need more positive evidence, we have it in the fiery eruptions that even now bear fearful testimony to the molten ocean seething within the globe and forcing its way but from time to time. ”

“ Great powers have been at work in this crust of our earth. Continents have been raised, mountains have been upheaved, vast masses of rock have been scattered into fragments. Here or there we may find the layers arranged as they were first laid down; but far more often we discover signs of later disturbance, either slow or sudden, varying from a mere quiet tilting to a violent overturn. ”

“ I have seen a little mountain-stream swell in the course of a heavy thunderstorm to such a torrent, brown and turbid with earth torn from the mountainside, and sweeping resistlessly along in its career a shower of stones and rock-fragments. That which happens thus occasionally with many streams is more or less the work all the year round of many more. ”

“ Such is the rosy cheek of an apple, or of a maiden, the luscious juice of the peach, the produce of the castor-oil plant, the baleen that lines the whale's enormous jaws, as well as that softest product, the fur of the chinchilla. Indeed, every particle of protoplasm requires, in order that it may live, a continuous process of exchange. It needs to be continuously first built up by food, and then broken down by discharging what is no longer needful for its healthy existence. ”

“ The soil is half pitch, half brown earth, among which the pitch sweals in and out as tallow sweals from a candle. It is always in slow motion under the heat of the tropic sun; and no wonder if some of the cottages have sunk right and left in such a treacherous foundation. ”

“ From that time to the present, the population of the world has undergone slow and gradual, but incessant, changes. There has been no grand catastrophe—no destroyer has swept away the forms of life of one period, and replaced them by a totally new creation; but one species has vanished and another has taken its place; creatures of one type of structure have diminished, those of another have increased, as time has passed on. ”

“ But on our southern coasts, the wall-sided cliffs, many hundred feet high, with vast needles and pinnacles standing out in the sea, sharp and solitary enough to serve as perches for the wary cormorant, confer a wonderful beauty and grandeur upon the chalk headlands. And in the East, chalk has its share in the formation of some of the most venerable of mountain ranges, such as the Lebanon. ”

“ Even if you had the biggest of telescopes to aid your vision, you could never discern from one of these bodies the planets which surround the sun, no astronomer in the stars could see Jupiter, even if his sight were a thousand times as powerful as any sight or telescope that we know. So minute an object as our earth would, of course, be still more hopelessly beyond the possibility of vision. ”

“ Yet the progress of science is so rapidly reconstructing the past that we may hope to solve even this problem; and to one who looks upon man's appearance upon the earth as the crowning work in a succession of creative acts, all of which have had relation to his coming in the end, it will not seem strange that he should at last be allowed to understand a history which was but the introduction to his own existence. It is my belief that not only the future, but the past also, is the inheritance of man, and that we shall yet conquer our lost birthright. ”

“ Men gaze with awe at the inscription on an ancient Egyptian or Assyrian stone; they hold with reverential touch the yellow parchment-roll whose dim, defaced characters record the meagre learning of a buried nationality; and the announcement, that for centuries the tropical forests of Central America have hidden within their tangled growth the ruined homes and temples of a past race, stirs the civilized world with a strange, deep wonder. ”

“ You must remember that every one of these stars is truly a sun, a lamp, as it were, which doubtless gives light to other objects in its neighborhood as our sun sheds light upon this earth and the other planets. In fact, to realize the glories of the heavens you should try to think that the brilliant points you see are merely the luminous points of the otherwise invisible universe. ”

“ The shimmering haze of reflected sunlight which perpetually enfolds her is only made apparent to us under exceptional circumstances which cut off some portion of her more immediate light, just as we see the motes in the air illuminated by a candle if we hide the actual flame from our eyes. The perennial twilight which seems to reign over the nocturnal hemisphere of Venus may compensate, perhaps, for the want of a satellite to modify its darkness. ”

“ Even now our knowledge carries us far enough to warrant the assertion that there was a time when our earth was in a state of igneous fusion, when no ocean bathed it and no atmosphere surrounded it, when no wind blew over it and no rain fell upon it, but an intense heat held all its materials in solution. In those days the rocks which are now the very bones and sinews of our mother Earth—her granites, her porphyries, her basalts, her syenites—were melted into a liquid mass. ”

“ It is impossible to contemplate the effects which followed the great earthquake—the passage of a sea-wave of enormous volume over fully one third of the earth's surface, and the force with which, on the farthermost limits of its range, the wave rolled in upon shores more than ten thousand miles from its starting-place—without feeling that those geologists are right who deny that the subterranean forces of the earth are diminishing in intensity. ”

“ When you look at such a collection as he has formed, and bethink you that these elephantine bones did veritably carry their owners about, and these great grinders crunch, in the dark woods of which the forest-bed is now the only trace, it is impossible not to feel that they are as good evidence of the lapse of time as the annual rings of the tree-stumps. ”

“ The cliffs above our beaches are rock; the sand upon our seashore is rock; the clay used in brick-making is rock; the limestone of the quarry is rock; the marble of which our mantel-pieces are made is rock. The soft sandstone of South Devon, and the hard granite of the [pg 4] north of Scotland, are alike rock. The pebbles in the road are rock; the very mould in our gardens is largely composed of crumbled rock. So the word in its geological sense is a word of wide meaning.
Now the business of the geologist is to read the history of the past in these rocks of which the earth's crust is made. ”