They are so many, so varied, so marvelous, so individualistic, that no mere chapter can do more than refer to them. Observe them, study them, get to know their rich personalities, and in the responses they will call forth in your own natures you will be amply repaid for all the time and trouble spent over them. They will add so much to your singing powers that you will soon begin to wonder how, as you Go Through Life Singing with God, you will be able to get in all the songs that the trees, fruit and flowers alone inspire you to sing.

Just as the roar of the surf often seems to be one long continued sound, so do the songs of the trees. It seems to be one song, a long, steady, deep flow of sound, in which is blent an infinitude of soothing overtones. Yet in reality I know it to be a thousand, ten thousand, ten thousand times ten thousand sounds blended into one. Each leaf has its own rustle, its part to play in the song of the tree as a whole, and were one leaf to fail, the whole song would be that much changed. It is the individual leaves joining in that give the song of the individual tree, and the trees uniting that give the song of the forest.

So is it with the great song of God. Each of us is the leaf of the tree; each nation or race, a tree; all the nations compose the forest, and thence comes the Universal Symphony.

CHAPTER XIX

THE SONGS OF THE ROCKS AND MOUNTAINS

EVEN the rocks sing to mankind of the eternal

goodness and love of their Creator. They form the crust of the earth and hold its mass together, giving a firm foundation for man's operations. The grand and majestic mountains, those backbones of continents, that give dignity and glory to horizons, and lure men to upward climbings of body, mind and soul, are formed of rocks, and the history of their formation-their dynamics; their varied composition, whether granite, basalt, sandstone, limestone, or porphyry; their age; their stratigraphy; the forces. that have shaped them as they are, all are questions of profound interest in which they sing to man.

Who that has seen the Rocky Mountains with their towering peaks-Pike's, Long's, Sophris, Ouray, the Mount of the Holy Cross, Twin Peaks, and a score of others, would not like to know their history, could not enjoy picturing, in imagination, their slow uplift from the level of the primeval ocean or great inland sea to their present commanding situation? What made the peaks ascend higher than the major mass of the range? How many centuries ago is it

since their uplift occurred? Was man then upon the earth? What kind of creatures moved around at their bases when the uplift began? Questions like these sing their songs to me every time I stand before any mountain range. But as the Rockies are the backbone of our continent let us see what answers the scientists have to give to some of them.

Time, to them, is in vast epochs. Scientists, far more than ordinary Christian people who claim to accept the Bible as the Divinely inspired Word, accept and understand that saying of the apostle: "One day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day." They deal in thousands, millions, epochs of years, and thus expand our conceptions of God, and help remove us from our littleness of thought as to Him, and what timelessness is. They can read clearly in the strata that they find, and the remnants of life embedded therein, much of the early day story. They picture for us a vast, inland sea. How large an area it covered we do not know, nor can it be determined, in years, how long it existed. It may have extended from about where the Missouri River now flows to the western side of Arizona and correspondingly north and south. Then this sea began to dry up, and the slow uplift of the continent began, the portion now called the Rockies emerging earliest from the water. It became a nearly level country, covered with tropical vegetation, with many wide, shallow streams and

swampy areas. But had we been there our chief attention would have been attracted to the monstrous creatures of the air, flying reptiles, which are now totally extinct. These were the pterodactyls, great dragons, with wings that measured eighteen feet from tip to tip, and were carnivorous. Imagine these vast monsters flying through the air, and hovering threateningly over you. The birds were all different then from those we have now, for they had jaws armed with teeth.

Then the dinosaurs appeared, some of them the largest land animals that ever walked the earth. They were very varied in character, some small and some monstrous. The bones of one of the largest of these dinosaurs ever found revealed that it must have been fully seventy feet long, stood sixteen feet high at the hips, and had a long tail, and it is estimated weighed from eighteen to twenty tons. Another was found more recently and his bones are now in the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh. He measures eighty-four and a half feet in length.

We are thankful these creatures have now disappeared, though the scientist has had much joy in excavating their bones, and re-creating the world, in imagination, that they inhabited.

Slowly the uplift continued, until in the hundreds of thousands, millions, of years the Rockies appeared somewhat as we now find them.

Thus the scientist sings to us of his knowledge of

the formation of the mountains, and we are profoundly moved by the creative power they display.

But equally interesting are the songs the stratigrapher sings to us of the way in which the layers of rock were deposited one upon another, prior to the time of the great uplift; and we listen in reverent wonder as we hear whence the material came from of which the various strata were formed. Then the paleontologist comes and pecks and hammers and splits up pieces of these various strata and he tells us of the life that existed at the time they were formed.

Next the miner comes and blasts and digs into these rocks and he finds the precious metals-gold, silver, copper, tungsten, molybdenite, and many others, and he can sing a wonderful song of where these minerals came from. And, as we watch the gold-seekers of every age we have the songs of the prospectors, of the discoverer of mines, of the workings of the mines, of the wealth they have produced, and the good or evil it has been to men as individuals, as families, as communities, or as a nation. What themes for poets, orators, novelists, are found in the gold and silver mines and all connected with them! Coal, too, is a part of this mineral wealth, and epics have been written-aye, and stories of man's black cupidity and of hatred and strife, terminating in bloody scenes-about its black substance. Did the Creator intend anything of this kind as He formed the deposits in the centuries of the dim

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