When, during a recent trip through the great Southwest, I saw the earth laid open by erosion as I had never before dreamed of, especially when I visited those halls of the gods, the Grand Canon and Yosemite Valley, I found my capacity to believe in the erosive power of water and the weather quite overtaxed.  It must be true, I said, what the geologists tell us, that water and air did all this; but while you look and wait, and while generations before you have looked and waited, all is as quiet and passive as if the slumber of ages wrapped hill and vale.  Invisible giants have wrought and delved here of whom we never catch a glimpse, nor shall we, wait and watch we never so long.  No sound of their hammers or picks or shovels or of the dynamite ever breaks the stillness of the air.

I have to believe that the valleys and mountains of my native Catskills were carved out of a great elevated plain or plateau; there is no other explanation of them.  Here lie the level strata, without any bending or folding, or sign of convulsion and upheavals, horizontal as the surface of the sea or lake in which their sediments were originally laid down; and here are these deep, wide valleys cut down through these many sheets of stratified rock; and here are these long, high, broad-backed mountains, made up of the rock that the forces of air and water have left, and with no forces of erosion at work that would appreciably alter a line of the landscape in ten thousand years; and yet we know, if we know anything about the physical history of the earth, that erosion has done this work, carved out these mountains and valleys, from the Devonian strata, as literally as the sculptor carves his statue from the block of marble.

Above my lodge on the home farm the vast layers of the gray, thin-sheeted Catskill rock crop out and look across the valley to their fellows two or more miles away where they crop out in a similar manner on the opposite slope of the mountain.  With the eye of faith I see the great sheets restored, and follow them across on the line which they made aeons ago, till they are joined again to their fellows as they were before the agents of erosion had so widely severed them.

These physical forces have worked as slowly and silently in sculpturing the landscapes as the biological laws have worked in evolving man from the lower animals, or the vertebrates from the invertebrates.  The rains, the dews, the snows, the winds—­how could these soft, gently careering agents have demolished these rocks and dug these valleys?  One would almost as soon expect the wings and feet of the birds to wear away the forests they flit through.  The wings of time are feathered also, and as they brush against the granite or the flinty sandstone no visible particle is removed while you watch and wait.  Come back in a thousand years, and you note no change, save in the covering of trees and verdure.  Return in ten thousand, and you would probably find the hills