The Salt Lake herald. [volume] (Salt Lake City [Utah]) 1870-1909, 1899-07-19

which mankind in general has looked
upon, and stranger still, continues to
look, upon fossil remains as they pre-
sent themselves to view in this and in
foreign lands.
Proctor has we'll said that it is a use
less waste of time to search the arch
ives of antiquity to try to discover the
people who first took note of astronom-
ical phenomena. But it is not so diff
cult task to ascertain the names of
the men or people who first compre-
hended clearly the principles of as
tronomy. So it is in geology, the sci
ence so largely based on fossil re-
mains. In Egypt, India, the holy land,
Greece, Italy and elsewhere in the old
world. as well as along the Atlantic,
gulf and Pacific borders of our own
country. or wherever marine rocks of
comparatively recent origin occur, the
fossils they bear are so plainly and
abundantly displayed as to force them
selves upon the attention of uncultured
or even but Semi-civiliZed people.
Long before the Christian era, Hero
dotus, Xenophanes, Aristotle and others
pointed out the occurrence of sea shells
high up on the TANKS of the hills and at
long distances from the sea. But it was
many centuries after that era before
the significance of fossils was we'll IN
minds, and even now. in contradistinc-
ton to the general diffusion of astro-
nomical principles, the vast majority of
civilized man is in the same bewildered
uncertainties regarding the meaning of
the simplest geological phenomena as
were the ancients centuries before
Christ
Let us here throw a few pictures on
the screen of our imagination; pictures
o1-ar h. he col %
Leaning on a fence near marl-pit
or other excavation, natural or artifi-
cial. is a man of the last decade of the
nineteenth century. who has been at
tracted from his house to that quarter
of his plantation by a peculiar pound
ing or pecking more or less akin to the
sound of the ditch-digger, but a what?
a man, young, to be sure, but old
enough to know better. breaking off
chunks of sandstone. clay and mari
here and there. splitting other frag-
ments and rapidly scanning their con-
tents, selecting this, rejecting that, all
with such an air of seriousness that eX-
pressions of pity, ridicule and wonder
play bv turns upon the bystander's
Finally, unable to re-
strain mere curiosity any longer and
feeling the strength of his own posi-
on his own plantation-he
Are you hunting for gold? Little shells
or bones. did you say? Well, l declare,
Do you reckon they ever were any
thing, ever really alive? Sea shells,
did YOU say? How do you suppose they
ever got way off here? Don't you
reckon thew were left here in time of
the fiood?"
After spending at this locality all the
time that the results seem to warrant,
and having wrapped by itself in paper
each choice shell like these (see figure
y, and others, and put them in his COL
Letting sack, the geologist sets out for
another exposure he has seen at a dis
lance or has been referred to by some
older worker in the same field. AS he
walks along the dusty red road with
MS nadir-seeking burden on his back,
MS thoughts turn from the heat of the
lay to the song of the bird, and finally
% the questions of the well meaning,
1ut ill-informed new acquaintance.