I have traveled horseback over the great arid plains of the West and read the story of the ages gone before.

In Arizona and New Mexico there are ancient ruins of forts and cities built by people we know not of.

Chalcedony Park with its petrified forest of mammoth trees silently testifies to a period when vegetation was rampant and on what is now a desert.

In Wyoming there is coal enough to furnish fuel for the United States for several centuries.

Coal is carbon made from trees and vegetation covered with earth and rock, pressed, and preserved through the thousands of years necessary to change it from vegetable to carbon.

Oceans and floods gradually covered millions of acres of trees and plants with ooze and soil and sand. Ages turned some of these deposits to stone.

There in bleak Wyoming is testimony and evidence of changes that time only can bring about.

"A thousand years is as a day and a day is as a thousand years." Thus wrote the scribe of old. So then we must consider this estimate of time in reading the history of the sequential events in the first chapter of Genesis which describes the order of the world's creation.

The arrangement of the formation of the world was the dividing the light from the darkness, conforming to the rotation of our globe and consequent day and night.

Then the separating of land and water, then the birth of vegetation on the land, the creation of fish and reptiles in the sea, the fowls of the air, the beasts of the field and finally the higher animal, man.

And the pages of the earth's surface carry in their stratification indelible records harmonizing with this scriptural arrangement of the evolution of the earth from its chaotic misty past to its concrete definite present.

Yes, this earth of ours is old, so old mere man cannot contemplate or accurately estimate its wondrous age.

The fossils of the mammoth reptiles and beasts which lived before the ken of man are numerous in the fascinating West I know so well.

In those arid desert hills are bones of the ancient rhinoceros, parent of our horse, and there are shells and fossils of fish and bones of animals imbedded in the strata of rock.

Man reads these pages and he is lost in bewilderment, impoverished in thought, dumb for words, paralyzed for expressions, to co-ordinate the evidence with any man measure of what the age of the earth is.

Historians say the world was 4,004 years old before the Christian era and 1915 years have passed since then, making the age to date 5,919 years.

The first records speak of Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel and up to the time Cain went to the land of Nod there is no record of any other people in the world.

It is not surprising that through the dark ages dates and facts were lost and even there may have been mistakes in translations.

We have not a complete history in written language, but we have some very definite history in the rocks and hills and lands and seas.

There must have been people in the world when Cain went to the land of Nod, for the Bible history says Cain took unto himself a wife and his wife bore him a son and she named the son Enoch, and she builded a city for her first born and the name of the city was called Enoch.

The world certainly is more than 5,919 years old. Read the record of time so plainly visible at Niagara Falls.

Niagara Falls eats away about two feet of rock in a century; the gorge is a good many miles long. At the present rate of erosion it takes 2,640 years to eat away a mile. Multiply that by the distance between the falls and Lake Ontario and you have an idea of how many years Niagara Falls has been at work.

Before Niagara Falls was in existence the country round about was under the sea; before that under glaciers; before that under the tropics, and I don't know how many times it has swung on its pendulum between Frigid, Temperate and Tropic Zones.

So you see we are getting lost in a labyrinth of mystery when we take these known facts concerning the earth's age and try to definitely set any particular number of millions of years as the old world's age.