Everywhere There
Were The Rudiments Or The Wrecks Of A Dimple In The Rock; The
Rocky Shells Of Whirlpools.
As if by force of example and
sympathy after so many lessons, the rocks, the hardest material,
had been endeavoring to whirl or flow into the forms of the most
fluid.
The finest workers in stone are not copper or steel
tools, but the gentle touches of air and water working at their
leisure with a liberal allowance of time.
Not only have some of these basins been forming for countless
ages, but others exist which must have been completed in a former
geological period. In deepening the Pawtucket Canal, in 1822,
the workmen came to ledges with pot-holes in them, where probably
was once the bed of the river, and there are some, we are told,
in the town of Canaan in this State, with the stones still in
them, on the height of land between the Merrimack and
Connecticut, and nearly a thousand feet above these rivers,
proving that the mountains and the rivers have changed places.
There lie the stones which completed their revolutions perhaps
before thoughts began to revolve in the brain of man. The
periods of Hindoo and Chinese history, though they reach back to
the time when the race of mortals is confounded with the race of
gods, are as nothing compared with the periods which these stones
have inscribed. That which commenced a rock when time was young,
shall conclude a pebble in the unequal contest.
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