Time and Change

It is estimated that the Hudson River deposits in the sea each year four hundred and forty thousand tons of mineral matter in solution which it has taken from the land, and the...

I suspect that in this volume my reader will feel that I have given him a stone when he asked for bread, and his feeling in this respect will need no apology. I fear there is mo...

The early uncouth, bizarre forms seem to be the result of the excess or surplus of life. Life in remote biologic times was rank and riotous, as it is now, in a measure, in tropi...

The rise of man from the lower orders taxes our powers of belief and our faith in the divinity that lurks underfoot far more than did the special creation myth. Creation by omni...

In our studies of life and of the universe as soon as we begin to bridge chasms by an appeal to the miraculous, or to the extra-natural powers, we are traitors to the scientific...

After we were rested and refreshed, and had sampled the mangoes that had fallen from a tree near the house, Mr. Aiken took us in his automobile up into the famous Iao Valley, at...

That there should be two or three Yosemites in the Sierra not very far apart, all with the main features singularly alike, is very significant--as if this kind of valley was lat...

Of course the periods and eras into which the geologists divide geologic time are as arbitrary as the months and seasons into which we divide our year, and they fade out into ea...

Nature stimulates our aesthetic and our intellectual life and to a certain extent our religious emotions, but I fear we cannot find much support for our ethical system in the wa...

The gods of evolution had served a long apprenticeship; they had gained proficiency and were master workmen. Or shall we say that the elements of life had become more plastic an...

To ordinary folk the sight is so extraordinary, so unlike everything one's experience has yielded, and so unlike the results of the usual haphazard working of the blind forces o...

The next morning the great crater of Kilauea was filled with fog, but it lifted, and the sun shone before noon. We passed a pleasant forenoon strolling along the tree-fringed br...

Either the geologists have greatly underestimated the amount of Archaean rock above the waters at the start, or else there are factors in the problem that have not been taken in...

But the gulf has been passed, and here we are in this teeming world of life and beauty, with a terrible past behind us, but a brighter and brighter future before us.

How often I thought during those days at the canon of the geology of my native hills amid the Catskills, which show the effects of denudation as much older than that shown here...

A German anatomist says that we have the vestiges of one hundred and eighty organs which have stuck to us from our animal ancestors,--now useless, or often worse than useless, l...

I have no doubt that the life of man upon this planet will end, as all other forms of life will end. But the potential man will continue and does continue on other spheres. One...