But the curious thing about it all is the enormous progeny from so small a beginning; the rocks seem really to have grown and multiplied like organic beings; the seed of the granite seems to have fertilized the whole world of waters, and in due time they brought forth this huge family of stratified rocks.  There stands the Archaean Adam, his head and chest in Canada, his two unequal legs running, one down the Pacific coast, and one down the Atlantic Coast, and from his loins, we are told, all the progeny of rocks and soils that make up the continent have sprung, one generation succeeding another in regular order.  His latest offspring is in the South and Southwest, and in the interior.  These are the new countries, geologically speaking, as well as humanly speaking.

The great interior sea, epicontinental, the geologists call it, seems to have been fermenting and laboring for untold aeons in building up these parts of the continent.  In the older Eastern States we find the sons and grandsons of the old Adam granite; but in the South and West we find his offspring of the twentieth or twenty-fifth generation, and so unlike their forebears; the Permian rocks, for instance, and the Cretaceous rocks, are soft and unenduring, for the most part.  The later slates, too, are degenerates, and much of the sandstones have the hearts of prodigals.  In the Bad Lands of Arizona I could have cut my way into some of the Eocene formations with my pocket-knife.  Apparently the farther away we get from the parent granite, the more easily is the rock eroded.  Nearly all the wonderful and beautiful sculpturing of the rocks in the West and Southwest is in rocks of comparatively recent date.

Can we say that all the organic matter of our time is from preexisting organic matter? one organism torn down to build up another? that the beginning of the series was as great as the end?  There may have been as much matter in a state of vital organization in Carboniferous or in Cretaceous times as in our own, but there is certainly more now than in early Palaeozoic times.  Yet every grain of this matter has existed somewhere in some form for all time.  Or we might ask if all the wealth of our day is from preexisting wealth—­one fortune pulled down to build up another,—­too often the case, it is true,—­thus passing the accumulated wealth along from one generation to another.  On the contrary, has there not been a steady gain of that we call wealth through the ingenuity and the industry of man directed towards the latent wealth of the earth?  In a parallel manner has there been a gain in the bulk of the secondary rocks through the action of the world-building forces directed to the sea, the air, and the preexisting rocks.  Had there been no gain, the fact would suggest the ill luck of a man investing his capital in business and turning it over and over, and having no more money at the end than he had in the beginning.