“I never burn them up. I just wash them in fire. Look sharp!” You look. The fire curls into and over and about the towel, and it becomes red hot, yet does not fall into ashes. Watch me. I take the tongs and pick my towel from the fire. As it is, red hot, I dip it into a pail of water. Now it is cool, pray take it and examine it. It is clean and whole as if new! That towel is made of rock! It is called asbestos. It is a very hard rock, and lies in layers of fine, silky fibres. You can pull these fibres or threads off, and apart, like flax; they can be spun and woven. Plenty of it is found in Canada. See, it looks like common cotton cloth. Found in thin sheets it is called “mountain-leather,” in thick sheets it is named “mountain-cork.” But it is all asbestos--a rock fibre. And what do they do with it? They mix fire-proof paints with it; make boiler felting; firemen’s cloaks; gloves for fire-workers. Long ago the ancients wrapped dead bodies in it, so that their ashes might not be lost when they were burned upon the funeral pyre. Wonderful stuff, is it not? But the brown still earth is full of such wonders. Let us return to look at the products of the middle period of earth-building, and see how the world grows more and more fit to be the home of the coming man. We find now palm, fig, oak, tulip, walnut, and sweet-gum trees. As all these trees produce fruits, seeds, or nuts suitable for food for animals, we should look for animals to feed upon them. We find the fossil bones of some of the dwellers in these woods; the rocks also retain their footprints. The great creatures, marching over the soft earth and mud, made deep tracks, and these remained like casts or moulds as the soil hardened; then sand and other sediment were deposited over them, and so the footprints were encased. The deposit, hardened into rock, has preserved the footprints for thousands of years. Strange that a thing so fleeting as a footprint on sand should remain to tell a story for ages! But what of the creatures that made these footprints? These were huge, two-legged animals with three-toed feet, stalking through the woods, and calmly browsing on the tree-tops! Science reconstructs some of these creatures, and finds that they had small heads, long necks, huge tails, and thick legs. These were mild but hideous creatures, and munched nuts and fruits. They may have glistened in the colors of the rainbow for all we can tell, but even color could not make beautiful a creature with a giraffe’s neck, an elephant’s legs, a crocodile’s tail, and a kangaroo’s head.