The Great Stone Book
The Great Stone Book
You have the whole history of the world in stones. Long before there were human eyes to read it, God had written it in a great stone book. Even now we can only, as it were, guess at the meaning, rather than read with absolute certainty the real history of the old world ere Adam fell in Paradise.
We turn to the great stone book of the history of the world, and we find that once this earth must have been under the influence of mighty fires. We find rock entirely devoid of all signs of life, where everything seems to have passed through a great furnace. Here we find granite that must have been in a liquid state, such was the intense heat. Some have supposed that the world was once all gas, which gradually cooled down and became condensed. The stone book tells us that in the course of time there came a great change, when water dominated over fire. Then the great seas began their deposits, and new rocks were formed. At first we find only minute traces of life; then traces of life so uncertain that we can scarcely distinguish the animal from the vegetable. So the growth went on, until by-and-by we meet with reptiles, a state in which huge saurians paddled or waded in the oozy waters, and creatures now quite extinct and unknown lived on the earth. This world must have been a strange place then, and very different from what it is now; for everything was below the feet; there were no trees upon its surface.
Next comes the period of ferns and all kinds of plants, which was followed after a time by the period of quadrupeds, when animals like the mammoth and other immense creatures lived upon the earth. The stone book has preserved traces of all these things, and a very wonderful book it is, and marvellously illustrated too; for in it you have the great teeth of elephants, and side by side with them the tiniest ferns and fishes; and what is even more remarkable, the very raindrops have been recorded on its pages. He who carefully and thoughtfully studies the history of our world as it is written in the stone book, will be a wiser man and a better man for what he has read therein.