GEOLOGY: AN INTRODUCTION TO EARTH-HISTORY

The history of the earth is clearly a matter of the greatest interest and importance to all of us who live upon its surface – of interest because we should like to understand the environment in which we find ourselves, of importance because some of the events are recorded in materials such as coal, oil and ores upon which our civilization is founded. Earth-history is dealt with in the science of geology, that branch of knowledge which is concerned with piecing together the records that the earth herself provides of her own stupendous drama – a drama that has now run for some two thousand million years. The common opinion was, and possibly still is, that the earth was made exactly as it is at this moment; it thus has no history. This opinion was that of the learned also so long as they confined themselves to speculations unchecked by any contacts with the common earth. But as soon as men went and saw what the earth was made of, hammered at the rocks in quarry and mine and so studied the records on the spot instead of speculating about them in the cabinet, ideas of a succession of events in the making of the earth began to germinate; the earth might have a history after all. The records are the rocks and we have first to inquire how they came to be read. This book contains five chapters which is written in lucid and easy language. Chapter 1 contains the search for the method, Chapter 2 deals with the sedimentary rocks as historical documents, Chapter 3 - Interventions from the depths, Chapter 4 - the revolutionary episodes and the last Chapter 5 the pattern of earth-history followed by short bibliography and index.

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