We change the surface of the earth a little with our engineering, drain a marsh, level a hill, sweep away a forest, or bore a mountain, but what are these compared with the changes that have gone on there before our race was heard of?  In my native mountains, the Catskills, all those peaceful pastoral valleys, with their farms and homesteads, lie two or three thousand feet below the original surface of the land.  Could the land be restored again to its first condition in Devonian times, probably the fields where I hoed corn and potatoes as a boy would be buried one or two miles beneath the rocks.

The Catskills are residual mountains, or what Agassiz calls “denudation mountains.”  When we look at them with the eye of the geologist we see the great plateau of tableland of Devonian times out of which they were carved by the slow action of the sub-aerial forces.  They are like the little ridges and mounds of soil that remain of your garden-patch after the waters of a cloudburst have swept over it.  They are immeasurably old, but they do not look it, except to the eye of the geologist.  There is nothing decrepit in their appearance, nothing broken, or angular, or gaunt, or rawboned.  Their long, easy, flowing lines, their broad, smooth backs, their deep, wide, gently sloping valleys, all help to give them a look of repose and serenity, as if the fret and fever of life were long since passed with them.  Compared with the newer mountains of uplift in the West, they are like cattle lying down and ruminating in the field beside alert wild steers with rigid limbs and tossing horns.  They sleep and dream with bowed heads upon the landscape.  Their great flanks and backs are covered with a deep soil that nourishes a very even growth of beech, birch, and maple forests.  Though so old, their tranquillity never seems to have been disturbed; no storm-and-stress period has left its mark upon them.  Their strata all lie horizontal just as they were laid down in the old seas, and nothing but the slow gentle passage of the hand of time shows in their contours.  Mountains of peace and repose, hills and valleys with the flowing lines of youth, coming down to us from the fore-world of Palaeozoic time, yet only rounded and mellowed by the aeons they have passed through.  Old, oh, so old, but young with verdure and limpid streams, and the pastoral spirit of to-day!

To the geologist most mountains are short-lived.  When he finds great sturdy ranges, like the Alps, the Andes, the Himalayas, he knows they are young,—­mere boys.  When they get old, they will be cut down, and their pride and glory gone.  A few more of these geologic years and they will be reduced to a peneplain,—­only their stumps left.  This seems to hold truer of mountains that are wrinkles in the earth’s crust—­squeezed up and crumpled stratified rock, such as most of the great mountain-systems are—­than of mountains of erosion like the Catskills, or of upheaval like the Adirondacks.  The crushed and folded and dislocated strata are laid open to the weather as the horizontal strata, and as the upheaved masses of Archaean rock are not.  Moreover, strata of unequal hardness are exposed, and this condition favors rapid erosion.