counts.

It is the last stroke on the nail that counts.

The moral is that many a prize has been lost just when it was ready to
be plucked.

Perseverance--patience--pluck--pep--are particularly profitable if
pursued until you ring the bell.

GEOLOGY

The Earth's Incontestable Pages of Truth

On the wall in the room where I write these lines is a fossil herring
which the boys dug up in the Rockies near Frozen Dog, at an altitude of
six thousand feet.

The herring is a salt water fish proving that the country around Frozen
Dog was at one time under the sea.

A few weeks ago, in the Missouri River bottom near Omaha, some Harvard
scientists discovered the remains of three ancient towns, one buried on
top of the other.

In the Nile valley in Egypt nine towns, in one location, have been
unearthed, each town in a different strata of alluvial deposit.

The ninth or top city is the ancient City of Memphis, once the largest
city in the world.

Those cities and the mute eloquence of my fossil herring plainly point
out the fact that the world is millions of years old.

Last summer I found some coral on Washington Island, which is off the
point of land where Lake Michigan and Green Bay meet. Coral is only
formed in salt water.

Geologists tell me that Washington Island and surrounding country
plainly shows marks of three distinct glacial periods.

Several times the poles were in the tropical climate, and consequently
the tropics or the temperate zones at least were under permanent snow
and ice.

The earth changes its axis every few thousand centuries, that we know.

The rains and snows wash the earth to the sea, depositing layers of sand
and sediment, which as the ages go by, turn to stone and form permanent
pages that man may read in succeeding eras.

During the world's changes, vast surfaces of earth and rock are lifted
to mountain heights and other places lowered and the sea covers them.

Thus the habitations of man have been buried, new earth covered them,
new towns were built and again the covering process.

Scientists are deciphering the story of the earth and its people.
Babylonia and Egypt left records which our learned men can read, but
ages and eons before these ancients there were races who could not
write even crude picture or hieroglyphic languages, and probably we
shall never know much about these very old times.

Around our Mississippi Valley we know of Mound Builders before our
Ind