Let us look at the idea of time, and see how we get at it. If we should come again to the mud puddle dried up, we should get an approximate idea of how long it took to form the deposit. Suppose we do not know the history, we know about the number of storms that are usual, and the amount of rainfall, and we have some guide in that succession of layers that are there. In the ancient rocks we have exactly the same guide. Somebody says in answer to all this, that in some places deposits take place very rapidly, and we can not judge. For instance, a flood in the Mississippi bears down a vast amount of matter. There is a delta of the Mississippi that has been built out during the memory of man. Whenever we find coarse material in a delta we say it was rapidly formed; if it is fine material, we say it was formed slowly. To-day the Mississippi is bearing down a vast mass of material, and the coarser materials drop by the mouth, but the finer are carried out over the sea, perhaps along the shore. This fine silt settles down amid the corals, the sea-weed and the ships. If the ocean could be drained, we would find on the decks of the ships that have been sunk a hundred years, as the divers tell us, this deposition on the bottom of the sea. No one can doubt about these deposits which have so many shells, that the deposit was made very slowly, because it would have been impossible for the shells to have lived if the material had been thrown down rapidly.
Therefore, when we come to take the rate of deposit, and the vast thickness of these rocks into account, we have a basis for determining approximately the periods of the time during which these rocks have formed. Of course, it is only to those who become minutely intelligent in regard to the details that this thought will have weight. If, for instance, I should go along where a man was cutting a tree, and count the annular rings, and I had never seen a tree cut down; if he should say an hundred years ago that tree was an acorn, I should be astonished, and it would have no weight with me, for I would not have the knowledge necessary. It is necessary to become familiar with this class of phenomena. Therefore in the beginning we want to study the phenomena that are taking place on the seashore, at the mouth of the rivers, and compare these with the phenomena that we find in the rock.
I recall a notable instance of this: That grand man, President Hitchcock, long since gone to rest, one of the greatest and most eminent scientists of his State, discovered tracks in the valley of the Connecticut River. He had to classify some sixty different classes of tracks, which are found in the valley of the Connecticut sandstone ledges, which, when it was soft, was admirably calculated to receive impressions. His attention was called to them, and he made them out to be bird tracks. The European naturalists were very reluctant to believe it. They did not believe that any such discovery could be made by any American. They sent over a man to see the alleged bird tracks, and he went all over the museum, and he went down to the quarry and saw all the specimens, and went away and came back again. President Hitchcock asked him about it, and he said that he did not think there were any bird tracks there. After dinner he took him out to the porch. A few days before he had found a flat stone, on which mud had been deposited, and a snipe had walked over it; the mud dried, and he thought it was an exact parallel with his bird tracks. So he put it on his porch. The gentleman said, “What have you got here?” There they were, the tracks of a bird, and a wader. He said nothing. He went away, and said they were bird tracks. He wrote afterward that he had for the first time to study how a wading bird walked on both sides of a median line. And so when he studied the habits of a bird, he saw that these fossils were bird tracks. I speak of this because it is a key.
I allude again to that sermon of Bishop Simpson’s, where Job asks these questions, and the Lord tells him to find out that right next to him. Why don’t you study that, and interpret it in that manner so sensible? You find everywhere we are doing that. On that account people can not get a knowledge of geology, because geology asks you to commence right at the door. Stoop and pick up the pebble there; learn the soil, and teach yourselves and your children what it was. This is a progressive world where we have all got to begin. It seems wonderful that we have not done that before. If you will try it, if you will get the first weed by your door, and teach your children about it, and go out further and study geology and all the other ologies in that way, life will be lifted on the highest plane for all. [Applause.] Everybody that has tried that has found an exceeding great reward.
I remember years ago a poem by James Russell Lowell, in which he describes the prophet going up to the hoary mountain to go and learn from God.
“Worn and footsore was the prophet,
When he gained the holy hill;
‘God has left the earth,’ he murmured,
‘Here his presence lingers still.’
‘God of all the olden prophets,