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 more of the matter of hard
science and of scientific speculation in this collection than of
spiritual and aesthetic nutriment; but I do hope the volume is not
entirely destitute of the latter. If I have not in some degree
succeeded in transmuting my rocks into a kind of wholesome literary
bread, or, to vary the figure, in turning them into a soil in which
some green thing or flower of human interest and emotion may take
root and grow, then, indeed, have I come short of the end I had in
view.
I am well aware that my own interest in geology far outruns my
knowledge, but if I can in some degree kindle that interest in my
reader, I shall be putting him on the road to a fuller knowledge
than I possess. As with other phases of nature, I have probably
loved the rocks more than I have studied them. In my youth I
delighted in lingering about and beneath the ledges of my native
hills, partly in the spirit of adventure and a boy's love of the
wild, and partly with an eye to their curious forms, and the
evidences of immense time that looked out from their gray and
crumbling fronts. I was in the presence of Geologic Time, and was
impressed by the scarred and lichen-coated veteran without knowing
who or what he was. But he put a spell upon me that has deepened as
the years have passed, and now my boyhood ledges are more
interesting to me than ever.
If one gains an interest in the history of the earth, he is quite
sure to gain an interest in the history of the life on the earth. If
the former illustrates the theory of development, so must the
latter. The geologist is pretty sure to be an evolutionist. As
science turns over the leaves of the great rocky volume, it sees the
imprint of animals and plants upon them and it traces their changes
and the appearance of new species from age to age. The biologic tree
has grown and developed as the geologic soil in which it is rooted
has deepened and ripened. I am sure I was an evolutionist in the
abstract, or by the quality and complexion of my mind, before I read
Darwin, but to become an evolutionist in the concrete, and accept
the doctrine of the animal origin of man, has not for me been an
easy matter.
The essays on the subject in this volume are the outcome of the
stages of brooding and thinking which I have gone through in
accepting this doctrine. I am aware that there is much repetition in
them, but maybe on that very account they will help my reader to go
along with me over the long road we have to travel to reach this
conclusion.
July, 1912.