change? Nothing else, in my judgment, than the monkeying of man with the
forces of nature. The poles changed, and it wouldn't surprise me a bit
that, if the north pole were ever found and could be thawed out, we
should find embedded in that great sea of ice evidences of a former
civilization, just as in the Saharan waste evidences of the same thing
have been found. I know of a place out West that is literally strewn with
oyster-shells, and yet no man living has the slightest idea how they came
there. It may have been the Massachusetts Bay of a pre-historic time, for
all we know. It may have been an antediluvian Coney Island, for all the
world knows. Who shall say that this little upset of mine found here an
oyster-bed, shook all the oysters out of their bed into space, and left
their clothes high and dry in a locality which, but for those garments,
would seem never to have known the oyster in his prime? Off in
Westchester County, on the top of a high hill, lies a rock, and in the
uppermost portion of that rock is a so-called pot-hole, made by nothing
else than the dropping of water of a brook and the swirling of pebbles
therein. It is now beyond the reach of anything in the shape of water
save that which falls from the heavens. It is certain that this pot-hole
was never made by a boy with a watering-pot, by a hired man with a hose,
by a workman with a drill, or by any rain-storm that ever fell in
Westchester County. There must at some time or another have been a
stream there; and as streams do not flow uphill and bore pot-holes on
mountain-tops, there must have been a valley there. Some great cataclysm
took place. For that cataclysm nature must be held responsible mainly.
But what prompted nature to raise hob with Westchester County millions of
years ago, and to let it sleep like Rip Van Winkle ever since? Nature
isn't a freak. She is depicted as a woman, but in spite of that she is
not whimsical. She does not act upon impulses. There must have been some
cause for her behavior in turning valleys into hills, in transforming
huge cities into wastes of sand, and oyster-beds into shell quarries; and
it is my belief that man was the contributing cause. He tapped the earth
for natural gas; he bored in and he bored out, and he bored nature to
death, and then nature rose up and smote him and his cities and his
oyster-beds, and she'll do it again unless we go slow."

"There is a great deal in what you say," said Mr. Whitechoker.