Even so the earlier observers were moved with wonder at the seeming
contrast between the ancient and the present order of nature. The
elemental forces seemed to have been grander and more energetic in
primeval times. Upheaved and contorted, rifted and fissured, pierced
by dykes of molten matter or worn away over vast areas by aqueous
action, the older rocks appeared to bear witness to a state of things
far different from that exhibited by the peaceful epoch on which the
lot of man has fallen.
But by degrees thoughtful students of geology have been led to perceive
that the earliest efforts of nature have been by no means the
grandest. Alps and Andes are children of yesterday when compared with
Snowdon and the Cumberland hills; and the so-called glacial epoch--that
in which perhaps the most extensive physical changes of which any
record remaining occurred--is the last and the newest of the
revolutions of the globe. And in proportion as physical
geography--which is the geology of our own epoch--has grown into a
science, and the present order of nature has been ransacked to find
what, 'hibernice', we may call precedents for the phenomena of the
past, so the apparent necessity of supposing the past to be widely
different from the present has diminished.
The transporting power of the greatest deluge which can be imagined
sinks into insignificance beside that of the slowly floating, slowly
melting iceberg, or the glacier creeping along at its snail's pace of a
yard a day.
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