53.
I have traveled horseback over the great arid plains of the West, and have read the story of the ages gone before.
The Remote Past.
In Arizona and New Mexico there are ancient ruins of forts and cities built by people we know not of. Chalcedony Park with its petrified forest of mammoth trees silently testifies to a period when vegetation was rampant on what is now a desert.
In Wyoming there is coal enough to furnish fuel for the United States for several centuries.
Coal is carbon made from decayed trees and vegetation, which became covered with earth and rock, and was subjected to tremendous pressure throughout the thousands of years required to effect the transformation.
Oceans and floods gradually covered millions of acres of trees and plants with ooze and soil and sand. Ages turned some of these deposits to stone.
There in bleak Wyoming is testimony and evidence of changes that time only can bring about.
"A thousand years is as a day and a day is as a thousand years." Thus wrote the scribe of old. So, then, we must consider this estimate of time in reading the first chapter of Genesis which describes the order of the world's creation.