In those layers of rock in the railway cut you see the leaves of the book of geology, infinitely older than the oldest scripture from man's hands, and relating things that occurred in those far-off nights and mornings of time that flitted over the globe ages before the human stem had set off from the trunk of terrestrial life. These geologic pages speak of occurrences in the building of the world that happened millions of years ago, and millions of years apart, though they have left marks and vestiges that the eye can discern as easily as if they had been the work of yesterday. No observant person can ride twenty miles through the country, especially in a hilly region, without having the fundamental facts of geology continually before him, and all that he needs in order to comprehend these things is a little preparatory reading, accompanied and followed by intelligent thought and observation. Anybody to whom all rocks look alike, and all hills the same, needs a little awakening of the mind. He is one of the persons had in view when this series was conceived and written, and he has no occasion to feel in the slightest degree offended by such a statement, for the simple fact that probably ninety-nine one-hundredths of his fellow citizens, and they among the best in the community, are just as unfamiliar with the plainest facts of geology as he is. Geology is not a difficult science to master in its main outlines, and there are few more fascinating when once its drift is caught. Even the beginner in the reading of the volume on geology, by seizing such chances of observation as every ride or walk affords, may in a very short time acquire the ability to read the history of a landscape from its face, to recognize the work of the glaciers in the great Age of Ice, to see where ancient streams flowed, or where molten rock has gushed up through the surface layers of the earth's crust, and even to recognize on sight some of the fossils, which are under everybody's feet in some parts of the country, and which still retain the forms of animals some of which were among the primal inhabitants of the earth, whose lines have died out, while others, though their individual lives expired tens or hundreds of millions of years ago, bear in their fossilized forms a close resemblance to modern relatives and descendants whose generations still flourish in the living world in this twentieth century of man's latest historic era.