carrying their heads as high and as proudly as ever.  Here and there the face of the cliff may have given way, or a talus slid into the valley, or a stream or river changed its course, or sawed deeper into the rock, and a lake been turned into a marsh, or the delta of a river broadened—­minor changes, such as a shingle from your roof or a brick from your chimney, while your house stands as before.  In one hundred thousand years what changes should we probably find?  Here in the Catskills, where I write, the weathering of the hills and mountains would probably have been but slight.  It must be fifty thousand years or more since the great ice-sheet left us.  Where protected by a thin coat of soil, its scratches and grooves upon the surface rock are about as fresh and distinct as you may see them made in Alaska at the present time.  Where the rock is exposed, they have weathered out, one eighth of an inch probably having been worn away.  The drifting of the withered leaves of autumn, or of the snows of winter over them, it really seems, would have done as much in that stretch of time.  Then try to fancy the eternity it has taken the subaerial elements to cut thousands of feet through this hard Catskill sandstone!  No, the evolution of the landscape, the evolution of the animal and vegetable kingdoms, the evolution of the suns and planets, involve a process so slow, and on such a scale, that it is quite unthinkable.  How long it took evolution to bridge the chasm between the vertebrate and the invertebrate, between the fish and the frog, between the frog and the reptile, between the reptile and the mammal, or between the lowest mammal and the highest, who can guess?

But the gulf has been passed, and here we are in this teeming world of life and beauty, with a terrible past behind us, but a brighter and brighter future before us.

X

“The worm striving to be man”

When our minds have expanded sufficiently to take in and accept the theory of evolution, with what different feelings we look upon the visible universe from those with which our fathers looked upon it!  Evolution makes the universe alive.  In its light we see that mysterious potency of matter itself, that something in the clod under foot that justifies Emerson’s audacious line of the “worm striving to be man.”  We are no longer the adopted children of the earth, but her own real offspring.  Evolution puts astronomy and geology in our blood and authenticates us and gives us the backing of the whole solar system.  This is the redemption of the earth:  it is the spiritualization of matter.