The Scientists Are
Able To Tell Us, With Some Definiteness, Which Came Forth First.
They say
that on the continent of America the earliest born land was a mass of
granitic rock in Canada, - the Laurentian Hills.
The next to peer above the
surface and feel the warmth of the sun were peaks and ridges that made
islands of themselves, in what are now known as the Rocky Mountains and the
Appalachians. Now, at last, the great waves of the sea and the resistless
storms had something to play with, and they pounced down upon the land as
with tooth and claw. They rubbed and pounded, raged and smashed for a
thousand years, and then another thousand, and still another, while Mother
Earth uneasily thrust forth her rocky children out of the ocean into the
light of day. Surprised at such treatment by the storms and seas, the newly
born earth masses began to crumble and "weather." The detached fragments
slipped back, or were washed back, into the deeper or shallower parts of
the ocean, and were there tossed back and forth, pounded and ground into
sand and silt, into pebbles and boulders, while more land was slowly being
thrust out for the angry sea to work upon. Layer by layer, the ground-up
masses were deposited in the inner ocean bed, parts of which were now
practically shut off from the vast ocean beyond. How many centuries of
centuries this process continued geologists do not tell us. Time is so
vast, so long, that they cannot divide those early days into weeks, months
and years, as we now do.
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