through all time, and must continue as long as the rain continues to fall, or as long as the sea continues to send its tax-gatherers to the land.  In this great cycle of give and take of the elements, the affairs of men cut but a momentary figure; how puny they are, how transient!  How the great changes, which in time amount to revolutions, go on over our heads and under our feet, and we rarely heed them, and are powerless to stay them!  A summer shower carries the soil of my side-hill, which is mainly disintegrated Silurian rock and shale, into the river, and some millions of years hence, when it has become stratified rock, and been lifted up into the light of day, some other, and, I trust, wiser husbandman, will be gathering his harvest from it, and be worried over the downpour that robs him of it.  The farmer’s worry is bound to come back with the soil, and be passed along with it.

VIII

PRIMAL ENERGIES

How puny and meagre is the utmost power man can put forth, even by the aid of all his mechanical appliances, when compared with the primal earth forces!  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.  Think of the over-thrusts and the folding and shearing of the earth’s crust.  The shrinking of the earth squeezes the rocks to an extent quite beyond our power of conception.  “So overpowering has been the horizontal movement in some cases,” says Dana, “that masses of rock thousands of feet in thickness have been buckled up and sheared, or, simply yielding to pressure, have sheared without folding, and been thrust forward for miles along a gently inclined plane.  These great reversed faults are termed over-thrusts or thrust-planes.  Sometimes such thrust-planes occur singly, at other times the rocks have yielded again and again, great sheets having been sliced off successively, and driven forward one upon the other.”  In northern Montana there is an over-thrust of the Cambrian rocks upon the late Cretaceous, of seven or eight miles, carrying with it what is now called “Chief Mountain,” which has been carved out of the extreme end of the over-thrust.  The contemplation of such things gives one a sense of power in Nature beyond anything else I know of.  The shrinking of the globe as a whole makes its rocky garment too big for it, and this titanic wrinkling and folding results.  When the strata snap asunder under the strain, we have earthquakes.  During the recent San Francisco earthquake, Mount Tamalpais, across the bay, and all the neighboring heights, were permanently shifted eight or ten feet.  The sides of the mountain, it is said, undulated like a curtain.  And this shaking and twitching of the great rocky skin of the earth was vastly less, in proportion to the size of the globe, than the twitching and trembling of the skin of a horse when he would shake off the flies, in comparison with the animal’s body.