He made a mistake in his assertion. Some workmen do manufacture articles, not indeed really half-worn, but with the look of being half-worn though actually new, for mercantile purposes—to pass off the new, as if it were old, when the old has greater value. But it may safely and with confidence be declared that the Divine Architect of Earth and Heaven never so puts forth His mighty power. When we see in Nature a thing worn in appearance we know that it has been worn in reality.
In his first day of quarry work Hugh Miller saw more than this. He noted surfaces of sandstone rock, laid bare by blasting, all “ridged and furrowed, like a bank of sand that had been left by the tide an hour before.” He had seen the latter hundreds of times when sailing over shallows near the shore. But here the ridges and furrows were petrified, changeless, and on dry land, where no ocean-waves could reach. No wonder he was puzzled.
Such ripple-marked sandstone is far from uncommon. It gives a perfect reproduction of the little sand-ripples or rounded ridges and hollows, often to be found on a sandy shore, either visible through a thin layer of water or left bare after the tide goes down. And it shows us how the sandstone rock must originally have been put together, under water. Soft undulations were made in the wet sand by one high tide, becoming in a measure hardened before the next high tide, and so keeping their shapes, while a fresh supply of sand was dropped upon them, partaking of the same outlines.
As time passed, more and more sand would be thus deposited, the ground probably sinking and the weight of sand increasing, until the lower layers had stiffened into rock. In after days a slow upheaval of the ground came about, and where ocean waters had flowed would be dry land.
By-and-by—who can say how long after?—the ripple-marked slabs of sandstone, petrified memorials of the past, would be found; perhaps far inland, if the country had risen much; perhaps in a quarry by a young Scotch working-lad, to be marvelled over as a specimen of old Ocean’s bygone work.
Another such token of the past is found in hardened raindrop traces, impressed on solid sandstone.
The rain fell on a soft sandy shore, making tiny holes in the sand, with splashed-up ridges round each small hole. Have we not all seen this? If not, we might have used our eyes better. Before the coming in of the next tide the surface hardened, like the sand-ridges already described, and so, being covered over by new layers of sand and gradually transformed into rock, it was later uplifted above the sea, and the holes have lasted intact until now.
It may be objected that the time between one high tide and another is hardly long enough for any such hardening process—even on the hottest and driest of summer days.
Then the hardening may have taken place only on that slender belt of sand, which is covered for a day or two by the spring tides, and is not again reached by ocean-waves for nearly a fortnight.
In earlier chapters it was shown—first, how the Ocean is ever striving to keep a level surface; and secondly, how the object sought is never attained to.