Page:How and Why Library 090.jpg



At length great animals appeared on the land. One of these died on the rivers edge; its body was caught in the swollen current and carried to the sea bottom. Here it was soon buried under the shower of soil and gravel which the river kept pouring into the sea. Each layer of this material, sand, gravel and remains of animals spread on the sea bottom hardened into rock under pressure from above.

After long ages men began to live on the earth. They lived in a very crude way. They had clumsy boats made from hollow tree trunks, bows and arrows and stone hatchets. One day a man dropped his stone hatchet from his boat and it fell to the sea bottom and was buried in the mud.

The ocean bed was thus built up toward the surface, and finally became dry land. Men dug deep into the earth, and in the rocks found marks of these buried objects; the stone hatchet, the animal and vegetable remains, shells, bones of fishes, etc., in descending layers of rock, and thus read the story as we have it here.