Every building is seen to be a remnant of once continuous beds of sediments,—­sand and slime on the floor of an ancient sea, and filled with the remains of animals,—­and every particle of the sandstones and limestones of these wonderful structures to be derived from other landscapes, weathered and rolled and ground in the storms and streams of other ages.  And when we examine the escarpments, hills, buttes, and other monumental masses of the plateau on either side of the canyon, we discover that an amount of material has been carried off in the general denudation of the region compared with which even that carried away in the making of the Grand Canyon is as nothing.  Thus each wonder in sight becomes a window through which other wonders come to view.  In no other part of this continent are the wonders of geology, the records of the world’s auld lang syne, more widely opened, or displayed in higher piles.  The whole canyon is a mine of fossils, in which five thousand feet of horizontal strata are exposed in regular succession over more than a thousand square miles of wall-space, and on the adjacent plateau region there is another series of beds twice as thick, forming a grand geological library—­a collection of stone books covering thousands of miles of shelving, tier on tier, conveniently arranged for the student.  And with what wonderful scriptures are their pages filled—­myriad forms of successive floras and faunas, lavishly illustrated with colored drawings, carrying us back into the midst of the life of a past infinitely remote.  And as we go on and on, studying this old, old life in the light of the life beating warmly about us, we enrich and lengthen our own.

THE END

Footnotes [by the editor of the 1918 original of this text]: 

[1] This essay was written early in 1875.

[2] The wild sheep of California are now classified as Ovis nelsoni.  Whether those of the Shasta region belonged to the latter species, or to the bighorn species of Oregon, Idaho, and Washington, is still an unsettled question.

[3] An excerpt from a letter to a friend, written in 1872.

[4] Muir at this time was making Yosemite Valley his home.

[5] An obsolete genus of plants now replaced in the main by Chrysothamnus and Ericameria.

[6] An early local name for what is now known as Lassen Peak, or Mt.  Lassen.  In 1914 its volcanic activity was resumed with spectacular eruptions of ashes, steam, and gas.

[7] Pronounced Too’-lay.

[8] Letter dated “Salt Lake City, Utah, May 15, 1877.”

[9] Letter dated “Salt Lake City, Utah, May 19, 1877.”

[10] Letter dated “Lake Point, Utah, May 20, 1877.”

[11] Letter dated “Salt Lake, July, 1877.”

[12] Letter dated “September 1, 1877.”

[13] Letter written during the first week of September, 1877.