he glacier waters, would give a ludicrous under-estimate of
their total power; but even so calling it, we should find for result
that eighty thousand tons of mountain must be yearly transformed into
drifted sand, and carried down a certain distance.[49] How much greater
than this is the actual quantity so transformed I cannot tell; but take
this quantity as certain, and consider that this represents merely the
results of the labor of the constant summer streams, utterly
irrespective of all sudden falls of stones and of masses of mountain (a
single thunderbolt will sometimes leave a scar on the flank of a soft
rock, looking like a trench for a railroad); and we shall then begin to
apprehend something of the operation of the great laws of change, which
are the conditions of all material existence, however apparently
enduring. The hills, which, as compared with living beings, seem
"everlasting," are, in truth, as perishing as they: its veins of flowing
fountain weary the mountain heart, as the crimson pulse does ours; the
natural force of the iron crag is abated in its appointed time, like the
strength of the sinews in a human old age; and it is but the lapse of
the longer years of decay which, in the sight of its Creator,
distinguishes the mountain range from the moth and the worm.

Sec. 4. And hence two questions arise of the deepest interest. From what
first created forms were the mountains brought into their present
condition? into what forms will they change in the course of ages? Was
the world anciently in a more or less perfect state than it is now? was
it less or more fitted for the habitation of the human race? and are the
changes which it is now undergoing favorable to that race or not? The
present conformation of the earth appears dictated, as has been shown in
the preceding chapters, by supreme wisdom and kindness. And yet its
former state must have been different from what it is now; as its
present one from that which it must assume hereafter. Is this,
therefore, the earth's prime into which we are born; or is it, with all
its beauty, only the wreck of Paradise?

I cannot entangle the reader in the intricacy of the inquiries necessary
for anything like a satisfactory solution of these questions. But, were
he to engage in such inquiries, their result would be his strong
conviction of the earth's having been brought from a state in which it
was utterly uninhabitable into one fitted for man;--of its having been,