It must be owned that man, in most of his struggles with the world around him, has fought blindly for his own ultimate interests. His contest, successful for the moment, has too often led to sure and sad disaster. Stripping forests from hill and mountain, he has gained his immediate object in the possession of their abundant stores of timber; but he has laid open the slopes to be parched by drought, or to be swept bare by rain. Countries once rich in beauty, and plenteous in all that was needful for his support, are now burned and barren, or almost denuded of their soil. Gradually he has been taught by his own bitter experience, that while his aim still is to subdue the earth, he can attain it, not by setting Nature and her laws at defiance, but by enlisting them in his service. He has learned at last to be the minister and interpreter of Nature, and he finds in her a ready and unrepining slave. In fine, looking back across the long cycles of change through which the land has been shaped into its present form, let us realize that these geographical revolutions are not events wholly of the dim past, but that they are still in progress. So slow and measured has been their march, that even from the earliest times of human history they seem hardly to have advanced at all. But none the less are they surely and steadily transpiring around us. In the fall of rain and the flow of rivers, in the bubble of springs and the silence of frost, in the quiet creep of glaciers and the tumultuous rush of ocean-waves, in the tremor of the earthquake and the outburst of the volcano, we may recognize the same play of terrestrial forces by which the framework of the continents has been step by step evolved.

Geographical Evolution

Archibald Geikie (28 décembre 1835, Édimbourg - 10 novembre 1924, Haslemere, Surrey) est un géologue écossais, et est notamment un des principaux théoriciens de l'érosion fluviale.

Si toute l'histoire n'est qu'une amplification de la biographie, l'histoire de la science peut être lue de manière le plus instructive dans la vie et le travail des hommes par lesquels les royaumes de la nature ont été successivement gagnés.

Géologie ... offre toujours un matériel d'observation. ... [Lorsque] le printemps et l'été arrivent, à quel point le marteau peut être facilité de boucler la taille, et l'élève émerge de la poussière de la ville dans l'air joyeux du pays, pendant quelques heures délicieuses parmi les rochers.

Ce rocher semblait être un volume curieux, régulièrement paginé, avec quelques extraits d'œuvres plus anciennes. Bacon nous dit que "certains livres doivent être goûtés, d'autres à avaler, et quelques-uns pour être mâchés et digérés". Du dernier honneur, je pense que le rocher est entièrement digne.

Lorsque l'automne revient avec ses vacances attendues depuis longtemps et que les préparatifs sont faits pour un scamper dans une localité lointaine, le marteau et le cahier n'occuperont pas beaucoup de place dans le Portmanteau et se trouvent certainement la plus divertissante.

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archibald_Geikie

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