om
Gable Mountain!

In pleading for a higher understanding of Nature's method and
accomplishment as a precedent to study and observation of our national
parks, I seek enormously to enrich the enjoyment not only of these
supreme examples but of all examples of world making. The same readings
which will prepare you to enjoy to the full the message of our national
parks will invest your neighborhood hills at home, your creek and river
and prairie, your vacation valleys, the landscape through your car
window, even your wayside ditch, with living interest. I invite you to a
new and fascinating earth, an earth interesting, vital, personal,
beloved, because at last known and understood!

It requires no great study to know and understand the earth well enough
for such purpose as this. One does not have to dim his eyes with acres
of maps, or become a plodding geologist, or learn to distinguish
schists from granites, or to classify plants by table, or to call wild
geese and marmots by their Latin names. It is true that geography,
geology, physiography, mineralogy, botany and zoology must each
contribute their share toward the condition of intelligence which will
enable you to realize appreciation of Nature's amazing earth, but the
share of each is so small that the problem will be solved, not by
exhaustive study, but by the selection of essential parts. Two or three
popular books which interpret natural science in perspective should
pleasurably accomplish your purpose. But once begun, I predict that few
will fail to carry certain subjects beyond the mere essentials, while
some will enter for life into a land of new delights.

Let us, for illustration, consider for a moment the making of America.
The earth, composed of countless aggregations of matter drawn together
from the skies, whirled into a globe, settled into a solid mass
surrounded by an atmosphere carrying water like a sponge, has reached
the stage of development when land and sea have divided the surface
between them, and successions of heat and frost, snow, ice, rain, and
flood, are busy with their ceaseless carving of the land. Already
mountains are wearing down and sea bottoms are building up with their
refuse. Sediments carried by the rivers are depositing in strata, which
some day will harden into rock.

We are looking now at the close of the era which geologists call
Archean, because it is ancient beyond knowledge. A few of its rocks are
known, but not well en