XLIX. ODD TOES 342 L. EVEN TOES 351 [Illustration: PHASES OF EARTH-BUILDING.] SEA-SIDE AND WAY-SIDE. LESSON I. EARTH-BUILDING. “Fair world! these puzzled souls of ours grow weak With beating their bruised wings against the rim That bounds their utmost flying, when they seek The distant and the dim. “Contentment comes not therefrom; still there lies An outer distance when the first is hailed; And still forever yawns before our eyes An utmost that is veiled.” --JEAN INGELOW, _Honors_. The starry heavens do not exist merely for us or for our earth. Among the splendid orbs which roll in space, earth is but one, and it shines with pale and borrowed light. Unnumbered systems moved upon their courses before our globe was lighted by the sun. But, for us who live upon the earth the history of the Universe opens with this small planet, a part of which we see and know. It seems to us, when we begin to inquire about our earth-home, that it must always have been a complete and finished world, just as it now is. Science denies this. Geology leads us far back, before time began to be reckoned here, and shows us some of the processes of world-building. Time was when this firm, beautiful, and life-filled earth was a vast sphere of gas, destitute of all its present order, and without germs of life. As the palace or the temple rises into beauty and harmony out of vast masses of material, such as wood, stone, brick, mortar, iron, and course after course is laid up in the building according to a definite pattern, so along the process of earth-building, force and matter, power and material, have been laying up the courses of the earth upon a uniform plan. And is the earth now finished? That we cannot say; there may be many more astonishing changes yet in store for it. We are now apt to call it the “solid earth,” because those parts of it with which we are acquainted, the soil and the rocks, are the most solid things that we know; but in plain fact the earth may still be partly liquid, with the exception of a comparatively thin crust. The distance through this ball, our earth, is nearly eight thousand miles, and the surface, or crust, is perhaps nowhere over a hundred miles thick. Thus we might typify the world[1] by a metal ball, having a thin shell of solid metal, and filled with melted metal. But as this crust, thin as it is in comparison, has for many thousand years proved thick enough and safe enough for a dwelling-place for men, I think we need not feel any anxiety because it is not thicker.