Excerpt from The Story of the Earth in Past Ages I have endeavoured to tell the story of the Earth so that its past history helps to explain its present condition. Explanations are given of the nature of the common materials which form rocks, of the ways in which they rest upon each other, and of the means by which they may be distinguished. The story of the Earth is divided into epochs by layers of rock which rest on each other and rise to the surface of the visible land, and to the floor of the ocean. Geological time cannot be defined in years. The time occupied by an existing river like the Rhine or the Niagara river, in excavating the gorge through which it flows, dates back beyond the antiquity imagined for man by historians. Yet this incident in sculpture of the Earth's surface is subsequent to the newest of the regular layers of rock. It is convenient to forget the human standard of time, and think of a period of geological time as the age when some rock, such as coal, accumulated, or when an extinct plant or animal was dominant on the Earth. Fossils are the remains of plants and animals by which each period of by-gone tine is distinguished. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.