mains in them, even after they are civilised, and all other forms
of the dread of Nature have died out in them, a dread of size, of vast
space, of vast time; that latter, mind, being always imagined as space,
as we confess when we speak instinctively of a space of time. They will
not understand that size is merely a relative, not an absolute term; that
if we were a thousand times larger than we are, the universe would be a
thousand times smaller than it is; that if we could think a thousand
times faster than we do, time would be a thousand times longer than it
is; that there is One in whom we live, and move, and have our being, to
whom one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. I
believe this dread of size to be merely, like all other superstitions, a
result of bodily fear; a development of the instinct which makes a little
dog run away from a big dog. Be that as it may, every observer has it;
and so the man's conclusion seems to him strange, doubtful: he will
reconsider it.

Moreover, if he be an experienced man, he is well aware that first
guesses, first hypotheses, are not always the right ones; and if he be a
modest man, he will consider the fact that many thousands of thoughtful
men in all ages, and many thousands still, would say, that the glen can
only be a few thousand, or possibly a few hundred, years old. And he
will feel bound to consider their opinion; as far as it is, like his own,
drawn from facts, but no further.

So he casts about for all other methods by which the glen may have been
produced, to see if any one of them will account for it in a shorter
time.

1. Was it made by an earthquake? No; for the strata on both sides are
identical, at the same level, and in the same plane.

2. Or by a mighty current? If so, the flood must have run in at the
upper end, before it ran out at the lower. But nothing has run in at the
upper end. All round above are the undisturbed gravel beds of the
horizontal moor, without channel or depression.

3. Or by water draining off a vast flat as it was upheaved out of the
sea? That is a likely guess. The valley at its upper end spreads out
like the fingers of a hand, as the gullies in tide-muds do.

But that hypothesis will not stand. There is no vast unbroken flat
behind the glen. Right and left of it are other similar glens, parted
from it by long narrow ridges: these also must be explained on the same
hypothesis; but they cannot.