lopmental changes must have been, like
those of any other infant organism, vastly more rapid and pronounced
than those of a later day; and to every clear thinker this truth also
must now seem axiomatic.

Whoever thinks of the earth as a cooling globe can hardly doubt that its
crust, when thinner, may have heaved under strain of the moon's tidal
pull--whether or not that body was nearer--into great billows, daily
rising and falling, like waves of the present seas vastly magnified.

Under stress of that same lateral pressure from contraction which now
produces the slow depression of the Jersey coast, the slow rise of
Sweden, the occasional belching of an insignificant volcano, the jetting
of a geyser, or the trembling of an earthquake, once large areas were
rent in twain, and vast floods of lava flowed over thousands of square
miles of the earth's surface, perhaps, at a single jet; and, for aught
we know to the contrary, gigantic mountains may have heaped up their
contorted heads in cataclysms as spasmodic as even the most ardent
catastrophist of the elder day of geology could have imagined.

The atmosphere of that early day, filled with vast volumes of carbon,
oxygen, and other chemicals that have since been stored in beds of coal,
limestone, and granites, may have worn down the rocks on the one hand
and built up organic forms on the other, with a rapidity that would now
seem hardly conceivable.

And yet while all these anomalous things went on, the same laws held
sway that now are operative; and a true doctrine of uniformitarianism
would make no unwonted concession in conceding them all--though most of
the imbittered geological controversies of the middle of the nineteenth
century were due to the failure of both parties to realize that simple
fact.

And as of the past and present, so of the future. The same forces will
continue to operate; and under operation of these unchanging forces each
day will differ from every one that has preceded it. If it be true,
as every physicist believes, that the earth is a cooling globe, then,
whatever its present stage of refrigeration, the time must come when its
surface contour will assume a rigidity of level not yet attained. Then,
just as surely, the slow action of the elements will continue to wear
away the land surfaces, particle by particle, and transport them to the
ocean, as it does to-day, until, compensation no longer being afforded
by the upheaval of the continents, the