time enough and force enough, and a layer of granite may be bent like a bow.  The crystals of the rock seem to adjust themselves to the strain, and to take up new positions, just as they do, much more rapidly, in a cake of ice under pressure.  Probably no human agency could flex a stratum of rock, because there is not time enough, even if there were power enough.  “A low temperature acting gradually,” says my geology, “during an indefinite age would produce results that could not be otherwise brought about even through greater heat.”  “Give us time,” say the great mechanical forces, “and we will show you the immobile rocks and your rigid mountain chains as flexible as a piece of leather.”  “Give us time,” say the dews and the rains and the snowflakes, “and we will make you a garden out of those same stubborn rocks and frowning ledges.”  “Give us time,” says Life, starting with her protozoans in the old Cambrian seas, “and I will not stop till I have peopled the earth with myriad forms and crowned them all with man.”

Dana thinks that had “a man been living during the changes that produced the coal, he would not have suspected their progress,” so slow and quiet were they.  It is probable that parts of our own sea-coast are sinking and other parts rising as rapidly as the oscillation of the land and sea went on that resulted in the laying down of the coal measures.

An eternity to man is but a day in the cosmic process.  In the face of geologic time, man’s appearance upon the earth as man, with a written history, is something that has just happened; it was in this morning’s paper, we read of it at breakfast.  As evolution goes, it will not be old news yet for a hundred thousand years or so, and by that time, what will he have done, if he goes on at his present rate of accelerated speed?  Probably he will not have caught the gods of evolution at their work, or witnessed the origin of species by natural descent, these things are too slow for him; but he will certainly have found out many things that we are all eager to know.

In nature as a whole we see results and not processes.  We see the rock strata bent and folded, we see the whole mountain-chains flexed and shortened by the flexure; but had we been present, we should not have suspected what was going on.  Our little span of life does not give us the parallax necessary.  The rock strata, miles thick, may be being flexed now under our feet, and we know it not.  The earth is shrinking, but so slowly!  When, under the slow strain, the strata suddenly give way or sink, and an earthquake results, then we know something has happened.

A recent biologist and physicist thinks, and doubtless thinks wisely, that the reason why we have never been able to produce living from non-living matter in our laboratories, is that we cannot take time enough.  Even if we could bring about the conditions of the early geologic ages in which life had its dawn, which of course we cannot, we could not produce life because we have not geologic time at our disposal.