Capitolo 39
washed from the hills and plans, or it formed from innumerable skeletons of
sea creatures, gather on the bed in sinking of the ocean as soft mud,
or crumbling sand or thick mud or gravel and conglomerate. Now
upheaved in an elevated table-earth, carved again now slowly from rain
and it gushes out in valley and watershed, and now once more brought down in
the failsoft and mere log of a highland, the crust suffered innumerable
changes, but almost all of them precisely the same in kind, and especially in
degree as those us he/she anchors we imperceptibly see to job in the world around
us. Rain that washes down the ground; crumbling of time the solid stone; whence
throwing to the foot of the cliffs; rivers that form delta to them blocked
mouths; pebble that gathers on the low spits; floods that sweep in front of them
the country; I freeze that grinds ceaselessly to the top of mountain; peat
filling on the a little deep lake--these are the principal factors that have gone
to make indeed now the physical world as us we know him/it. Earth and sea,
coast and contour, hill and valley, valley and throat, earth-sculpture
generally--all are separately due to the incessant interaction of these
small and unnoticeable causes, it helped or it delayed from the slow effects of
the elevation or depression from the contraction of the earth toward his/her really
centre. Geology, in short, you/he/she has shown us that the world is what is,
not from virtue of a sudden creative fit solo, neither from virtue of
following terrible and recurrent cataclysms, but from virtue of the slow one
continuous action of causes still always equally operational.
The evolution in geology naturally conducts to the evolution in the science of
life. If the same world grew, because not also the animals and plants that
do you occupy him? Already of eighteenth active and anxious century this obvious
idea had struck in the germ a big number of zoologists and botanists,
and in the hands of Lamarck and Erasmus Darwin taken form as a
separate and elaborate system of the organic evolution. Buffon had been the