Mount Shasta - a vision of immensity such as pertains to the vast universe rather than to our own planet.

Geology is rapidly taking its place as an introduction to the higher history of man. If the author has sought to exalt a favorite science, it has been with the desire that man-in whom geological history had its consummation, the prophecies of the successive ages their fulfilment-might better comprehend his own nobility and the true purpose of his existence.

The grand old Book of God still stands; and this old earth, the more its leaves are turned over and pondered, the more it will sustain and illustrate the Sacred word.

The profoundest facts in the earth's history prove that the oceans have always been oceans.

For nine miles along a submerged ridge, the corals rise in lumpy hillocks that spread out 100 yards or more, resembling heaped scoops of rainbow sherbet and Neapolitan ice cream. The mounds, some 100 feet tall, sprout delicate treelike gorgonians that sift currents for a plankton meal. Fish, worms and other creatures dart or crawl in every crevice. This description could apply to thousands of coral reefs in shallow, sun-streaked tropical waters from Australia to the Bahamas. But this is the Sula Ridge, 1,000 feet down in frigid darkness on the continental shelf 100 miles off Norway's coast.

Mr Hall's hypothesis has its cause for subsidence, but none for the lifting of the thickened sunken crust into mountains. It is a theory for the origin of mountains, with the origin of mountains left out.

Mount Shasta - a vision of immensity such as pertains to the vast universe rather than to our own planet.