all phases of human activity are touched by it. The preacher is a better
preacher, the doctor a better doctor, the lawyer a better lawyer, the
editor a better editor, the business man a better merchant, and the
mechanic a better workman, if they follow scientific methods. Indeed,
any man will be a better husband, father, and citizen, if he has some
trustworthy knowledge of the laws under which this great universe, down
to his own little part of it, lives, moves, and has its being.

NATURE'S MIRACLES.

EARTH.

CHAPTER I.

WORLD-BUILDING AND LIFE.

"In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth
was without form, and void."

Whatever our speculations may be in regard to a "beginning," and when it
was, it is written in the rocks, that, like the animals and plants upon
its surface, the earth itself grew; that for countless ages, measured by
years that no man can number, the earth has been gradually assuming its
present form and composition, and that the processes of growth and decay
are active every hour.

The science that deals with the formations and stratifications that are
found on the earth and under the earth, and all the forces that have
been and are now active in their formation, is called Geology (earth
science). It is a science about which little is known by the average
individual, and yet it is one of transcendent interest, from the study
of which the lover of nature can obtain a vast amount of profit and
pleasure. When the uncultured man sees a stone in the road it tells him
no story other than the fact that he sees a stone and that it would
better be removed; and all the satisfaction he gets out of it is in the
thought that he has saved some unlucky wagon wheel from being wrenched
or broken. The scientist looking at the same stone perhaps will stop,
and with a hammer break it open, when the newly exposed faces of the
rock will have written upon them a history that is as real to him as the
printed page. He is carried back to a far-off time, where he sees the
processes and forces at work that have formed this stone and made it
what it is, not only in its outward form, but in its constitution, down
to its molecules and atoms. (The word "atom" is used in chemistry to
mean the smallest particle of an elementary substance that will combine
with the atoms of another substance to form new compounds of matter. And
molecules are made up of atoms.) The scientist looking