All the material forces, therefore, of the universe, both mechanical and physiological, with their actions and reactions, their equilibria and perturbations, are tending gradually toward a general and permanent rest. The threads of their mutual connection may be closely interwoven, but somewhere there is a beginning and an end. Within the grand cycle of their active lifetime apparent circles may be described, but, like the eddies of a river stream, they are lost in the general current, or, like the gyrations of a disk descending through the sea, they are only apparent, and wend their way toward ultimate rest. The same exact conditions are never reproduced. [See Appendix, Note IX.]

L

CHAPTER XXXVI.

WILL THE MOUNTAINS BE LEVELED?

ET us now direct our attention to a more specific examination of the circumstances under which the visible activities of our terrestrial abode are carried on. The fact which first and most strongly arrests our attention is the presence of universal and perpetual change. This fact alone demonstrates that the existing terrestrial order had a beginning. Work is in progress before our eyes; we may easily determine what has been accomplished and what remains to be accomplished. Had these changes been in progress from all eternity, every thing which existing forces are capable of effecting would have been consummated an eternity since, and physical stagnation would now be reigning. It is equally plain that the work which remains to be accomplished is a finite work, and is destined to be accomplished in finite duration.

What is the work with which terrestrial forces are occupied? What are the labors of oceans, and winds, and rains, and frost, and mountain torrents, and swollen streams, and pent-up fires? We witness here a grand antagonism of Nature's energies. While on one hand Nature has exerted herself to rear the continents, on the other hand a different set of forces has been equally assiduous in beating them down. There was a time when the igneous forces possessed the advantage, and island, and continent, and Alp rose triumphant over the sea. That was the age when the igneous forces were in their youth. Then all their elastic energies were commissioned to rear a dwell

ing-place for man. But, during geologic ages unnumbered, the powers of water have been wrestling with the powers of fire. Rains and floods have been tearing down what fire had built. The energies of fire have been wasting; the earthquake and the volcano have been stricken with the palsy of age. Old Ocean, however, is still in his youth. The volcano had been smitten with decrepitude even before the ocean had its birth. The denuding and destroying agencies of Nature have gained the ascendency, and, in the inevitable order of things, are destined to retain it.

Let us glance at the labors of water in leveling the inequalities which ancient volcanic energy had long ago created upon the surface of our planet. Throughout the whole extent of the circumambient sea, the tireless surge is gnawing at the rock-bound shore, and mouthful by mouthful the continents and the islands are being swallowed up. The sediment which every summer shower washes down the hill-side is so much material taken from the hill-top and deposited in the valley. The deep mould of the alluvial fiat is made up of the spoils of the adjacent declivities. By as much as the valley is raised, the hills are lowered. The turbid waters of a winter stream are hurrying off with a freight of sediment stolen from a hundred townships. The mud which settles in my glass of river water upon a Mississippi steam-boat is a mouthful of the Rocky Mountains-or perchance of the Alleghanies—or, what is still more probable, it is a whole museum of soils, gathered from the fertile farms of New York and Pennsylvania-from the sandy cliffs of the Great Kenawha-from the clayey slopes of Cincinnati-from the slimy borders of Lake Pepin-from the melon-patch of a Cheyenne squaw, and from the beetling cliffs of the far-off Yellowstone. Of what part of the country is not this slime the washing? From month to month, and from year to year, and from age to age, this

stately river is floating off the land-not noisily, but sullenly and angrily, as if the waters had some great wrong to avenge upon the land. And all these filchings from the mountain and the plain are restored again to the sea. Old Ocean is receiving back his own. The rivers are his allies, and right faithfully do they forage to supply the cravings of his insatiate maw.

We witness such work in progress during the brief moment of our tarry upon the earth. We look back along this line of operations, and discern for the first time the gigantic results which have already been achieved by the wearing agency of waters. Not during the lifetime of Adam's race alone, but during the age of quadrupeds which preceded him—through the dynasty of reptiles, still more ancient, have these denuding forces been ceaselessly engaged in scraping, and gouging, and scarring the face of Nature. River-beds have been deeply excavated and again obliterated by a plethora of rubbish poured forward by some more gigantic operation. Lake basins have been scooped out-Niagara gorges dug-square miles of land, with its underlying rocky floors, have been swept away. From the summits of the Catskill Mountains the Old Red Sandstone once stretched eastward perhaps to Massachusetts Bay. The powers of water have strewn it over Long Island Sound, and far to the seaward of Sandy Hook. The Cumberland Table-land once reached a hundred and fifty miles westward over the basin of Middle Tennessee. The site whereon the city of Nashville now stands was once a thousand feet beneath the level of the land. Half a state was scraped away to extend the borders of Mississippi and Alabama. The Alleghanies, in their prime, were three thousand feet higher than human eyes have ever seen them. Their ancient summits are sunken in the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico. The Great American Desert was once as

fertile as the Valley of the Mississippi. A great river watered it for a thousand miles, while a hundred tributaries dispensed fertility throughout the region which was then the garden, as it is now the desert, of the continent. That fertile plateau has been drained to death. Each stream has drilled a frightful chasm deep through the rocky foundations of the plain (Fig. 96, 97). The mother stream, the Colorado, dwarfed to a withered mockery of what it was, now creeps along at the bottom of a narrow gorge whose rocky walls rise, in places, more than a mile in height. From the brink of this appalling chasm, three hundred miles in length, your vision struggles down six thousand feet into the realm of twilight; and in this prison the attenuated Colorado-patriarch of American riversis wasting its senile energies from year to year, but, with "the ruling passion strong in death," it is still carrying off the land, even though each season's work sinks it into a deeper grave.

Such are the works of running streams and corroding waves. The record of their labors is the utterance of the destiny of the land. History inverted becomes prophecy. The doom of the mountains is engraven upon their rocky buttresses. Half the pride of the Alleghanies has already been removed. Rounded hill-top is dissolving into plain. Defiant granite, which buffeted the lightnings that rent Sinai, and frowned upon the flood that drowned "the world," shall yet be brought down by the multitudinous pelting of rain, and the insidious sapping of frost, The mountains shall be wiped off. The continents shall be worn out. The rivers will have dug their graves. The ocean will have eaten up the land; and all there was of the dwelling-place of man will be a rocky islet, a ragged bluff, a sunken reef-the crumbs that fell from old Ocean's meal.

There was a time when, by degrees, the continents were