A good friend of mine wanted to see me advanced in life, and so sent word to me if I would come and deliver a lecture on geology before the board of their college, he thought I would get a professorship. It was an Old School Presbyterian college. I prepared myself without regard to expense. I went down to Boston, and saw Prof. Hitchcock and Prof. Agassiz, and I hunted through the books, and I made a lecture. You ought to have heard it. [Laughter.] You would not be here now. [Laughter.] It treated of all the cosmogonies; it went through primal chaos, through the azoic, the silurian, the devonian, and the various strata, until it introduced man on the scene. It took me two hours. It was a cold night, and they all shivered, and looked as if they wished I was in some warmer place. I did not get the professorship, and the college died the next year. [Laughter.]

Write all you can, it tends to make you accurate and fixes your knowledge, and then do with it as a good old Methodist presiding elder told me once on a time. We had planted some melons and cucumbers, but he did not seem to be pleased with them. He told the folks that we had splendid cucumbers, and he knew how to fix them: slice them up thin, put them in water, turn off the water, and put on pepper and salt, and throw them out of the window. That is what you are to do with the written lectures, read, write, and, as Emerson says, get drunk with your subject. You will not hear anything more of the dryness of your subject. It makes a subject dry because a man has not got enough of it in him to see the great connecting principles in him, so that he is aroused and sees the ultimate of it as well as the details, and the ultimate of it is man. It is for man and made for man. This being created here and being put in the midst of all of these things, is to make him greater, grander, and bring him into relation with the truth, and then by symmetrizing his being and aligning him with God in the great work of God, that is to make of this globe a heaven.

Geology will help you to do that, as the Bishop said yesterday, it will give you visions of the infinite possibilities of yourselves when you once align yourselves with God and live up to the truth. God has put into your hands the power to subordinate this globe, its storms, its climates, and their condition; you want geology for that. You want to begin to know these rocks at Chautauqua. I would like to put in your collection first, all the stones in the vicinity of Chautauqua. Go out into the quarry, with its masonry that God has built. Here you find the stones all covered over with God’s hieroglyphics, here they are, corals, shells, and things that were alive. If you knew a way of petrifying these trees and plants, would you not think it was a pleasing way and do it? Here it is done. Here you have a study, a whole natural history, a whole natural creation that God made in order to make man possible, and capable of producing grain and grass and flower to make man live, all depending upon the fact that these rocks were built up as you find them to-day.

You find the old rocks arranged in strata, layers. You have them there by the depot. How was that? Go by the hillside. Let a portion of the drops of rain get together and make a stream, and they will form a gulley. What do you see? The soil has been washed out, and the material of the soil has been spread out. A pond, perhaps, will be there, such as you and I used to navigate, and then it dries up on the surface, and cracks at right angles. Here it is. There was a little mud puddle, and it cracked when it dried up. If you will take up a piece of it, you will find that it is arranged in layers. Here, see that. Through all that summer, and the previous summer, there was a succession of storms, and each one brought its contribution to the whole. If it was a big storm, it was thick, if a little storm, it was thin. Just like the exogenous trees. You count the lines of growth, and know the age of the tree. We have one layer spread over the other, all little volumes, but when it has quit growing, as in libraries, you will have a thick book. So, I say the layers write the storms of the past.

What else would we find there? If there were snails, leaves and sticks, they would be carried down and buried in the mud. If we take a section, and take out all that loose stuff, we have a section which gives a history of the different seasons, and the animals and plants that washed in there during the time that little mud puddle had been in existence. That is the beginning, the starting point of all the knowledge of the rocks; to begin right by us and see what is done now, and observe that wearing action. If you will go from that little gulley on the hillside to a larger valley, and still larger, to the great valley of the Mississippi, you will find the same thing repeated.

Here is a specimen that I got right here where they are ballasting the road. Here you could see a mass of sand and gravel. It goes on wherever there is sand and gravel and there is lime and water; it is compounded together. We have there fossils. Here, for instance, you have various forms of plants and corals, and so on, and you have here in the rocks right about you shells, coral, seaweed, preserved in the same way. Thus you get your petrefactions. Thus you get the layers that you call strata. All these layers of rock are simply sediment that was once carried down and spread out in a body of water. Is not that simple enough?

Here is that slab, all covered over with seaweed and shells, that was one time a bottom of the ocean; there was a volume of clay, and you see resting in there rolls of seaweed. Trailing over this all along these shores on the spot where we now stand, there were seaweed, and coral, and all the animal life. Here is a head of a large animal, a cephalopod, and here is a tail, and the rest of the body is probably under the railroad track. Here is a curved shell. This rock abounds in the ocean. They were the pirates of the ocean. They were the ancient devilfish. They had enormous arms. They were very fine in their time, but, as some one says about the Pilgrim Fathers, we should be thankful that they did not come down to us.

We have another class of rocks in our boulders and hard heads. Here are some without any section. Here is a mass of modern lava. Here you see this huge mass. All these landscapes show the different kinds of rocks in their relations. This irregular mass is the unstratified rocks. They have been melted and cooled from a state of melting. We know them to be crystals. They consist of quartz, feldspar, and mica, which are the alphabet of mineralogy. We have the crystals, which we know only exist when there has been a state of melting. These unstratified rocks are the material of all our quarries and great rocks.

There are two great classes: the stratified, in layers, which came from sediment deposited in the ancient seas, and the unstratified, which were once melted masses thrown out of the interior of the earth. The granite, the unstratified rocks, form the backbone of the continent; they are the underlying rocks. They occur as veins, coming up through the stratified rocks, and overflowing the surface.

Now, in this section of the rocks which we have as they are stratified, formed in layers one above the other, we come to the idea of time. I was going along this morning, with a basket and one of these stones in my hand, and a man’s attention was attracted, and he asked how long since those animals were alive. I said a million of years. He looked rather astonished, and expressed himself that I could not know. The idea of such great amounts of time strikes any one like the vast areas of space. At the first step in geology we have got to expand our notions of time. The six thousand years will not do. Some people think there is something in the Bible about six thousand years. There is no such thing. It is a chronology that has grown up like Milton’s Paradise Lost. Many people think that Milton’s Paradise Lost is a part of the Bible. In Genesis we are told of days, which everybody understands to mean periods of time, and of time since the beginning, when the earth was without form and void. We have nothing definite said in the Bible, or any other book, except the approximate indications which are found in the great stone book of Nature.