Abstract
TO write the history of the earth is a very different undertaking from writing the history of a people. In the latter case, a diligent seeker can usually find some ancient monastery where far-sighted historians of an earlier generation have collected the more important records which he requires, and placed them within reach of his hand. With the earth's history, which is the province of geology, it is another matter. The great globe has been millions of years in the making, and, except for a mere fragment of its most recent history, it has had neither a historian nor an observer. Its formation has not only extended over an almost incomprehensible interval of time, but we have no parallel in our limited experience to help us to understand its complicated development, and no system of classification adequate to the task, even of grouping in an orderly way all the observed rock and mineral formations with reference to the forces which moulded them. And even if we could correctly interpret all the visible rock records, we are still quite helpless to comprehend all those earlier activities of the formation period, the record of which is now obliterated.
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Geophysical Research 1 . Nature 88, 331–334 (1912). https://doi.org/10.1038/088331a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/088331a0