Milton’s picture seem hollow and unreal.  The creative and poetic imagination has undoubtedly already reached its high-water mark.  We shall probably never see the great imaginative works of the past surpassed or even equaled.  But in the world of scientific discovery and interpretation, we see the imagination working in new fields and under new conditions, and achieving triumphs that mark a new epoch in the history of the race.  Nature, which once terrified man and made a coward of him, now inspires him and fills him with love and enthusiasm.

The geologist is the interpreter of the records of the rocks.  From a bit of strata here, and a bit there, he re-creates the earth as it was in successive geologic periods, as Cuvier reconstructed his extinct animals from fragments of their bones; and the same interpretative power of the imagination is called into play in both cases, only the palaeontologist has a much narrower field to work in, and the background of his re-creations must be supplied by the geologist.

Everything connected with the history of the earth is on such a vast scale—­such a scale of time, such a scale of power, such a scale of movement—­that in trying to measure it by our human standards and experience we are like the proverbial child with his cup on the seashore.  Looked at from our point of view, the great geological processes often seem engaged in world-destruction rather than in world-building.  Those oft-repeated invasions of the continents by the ocean, which have gone on from Archaean times, and during which vast areas which had been dry land for ages were engulfed, seem like world-wide catastrophes.  And no doubt they were such to myriads of plants and animals of those times.  But this is the way the continents grew.  All the forces of the invading waters were engaged in making more land.

The geologist is bold; he is made so by the facts and processes with which he deals; his daring affirmations are inspired by a study of the features of the earth about him; his time is not our time, his horizons are not our horizons; he escapes from our human experiences and standards into the vast out-of-doors of the geologic forces and geologic ages.  The text he deciphers is written large, written across the face of the continent, written in mountain-chains and ocean depths, and in the piled strata of the globe.  We untrained observers cannot spell out these texts, because they are written large; our vision is adjusted to smaller print; we are like the school-boy who finds on the map the name of a town or a river, but does not see the name of the state or the continent printed across it.  If the geologist did not tell us, how should we ever suspect that probably where we now stand two or more miles of strata have been worn away by the winds and rains; that the soil of our garden, our farm, represents the ashes of mountains burned up in the slow fires of the geologic ages.