The observer, if he be a cautious man, begins to see if he can
disprove his own conclusions; moreover, being human, he is probably
somewhat awed, if not appalled, by his own conclusion. Hundreds of
thousands of years spent in making that little glen! Common sense
would say that the longer it took to make, the less wonder there was
in its being made at last: but the instinctive human feeling is the
opposite. There is in men, and there remains in them, even after
they are civilised, and all other forms of the dread of Nature have
died out in them, a dread of size, of vast space, of vast time; that
latter, mind, being always imagined as space, as we confess when we
speak instinctively of a space of time. They will not understand
that size is merely a relative, not an absolute term; that if we
were a thousand times larger than we are, the universe would be a
thousand times smaller than it is; that if we could think a thousand
times faster than we do, time would be a thousand times longer than
it is; that there is One in whom we live, and move, and have our
being, to whom one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years
as one day. I believe this dread of size to be merely, like all
other superstitions, a result of bodily fear; a development of the
instinct which makes a little dog run away from a big dog. Be that
as it may, every observer has it; and so the man's conclusion seems
to him strange, doubtful: he will reconsider it.
Moreover, if he be an experienced man, he is well aware that first
guesses, first hypotheses, are not always the right ones; and if he
be a modest man, he will consider the fact that many thousands of
thoughtful men in all ages, and many thousands still, would say,
that the glen can only be a few thousand, or possibly a few hundred,
years old. And he will feel bound to consider their opinion; as far
as it is, like his own, drawn from facts, but no further.
So he casts about for all other methods by which the glen may have
been produced, to see if any one of them will account for it in a
shorter time.
1. Was it made by an earthquake? No; for the strata on both sides
are identical, at the same level, and in the same plane.
2. Or by a mighty current? If so, the flood must have run in at
the upper end, before it ran out at the lower. But nothing has run
in at the upper end. All round above are the undisturbed gravel-
beds of the horizontal moor, without channel or depression.
3. Or by water draining off a vast flat as it was upheaved out of
the sea? That is a likely guess. The valley at its upper end
spreads out like the fingers of a hand, as the gullies in tide-muds
do.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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