I have traveled horseback over the great arid plains of the West, and have 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 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 decayed trees and vegetation, which became covered with earth and rock, and was subjected to tremendous pressure throughout the thousands of years required to effect the transformation.

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 first chapter of Genesis which describes the order of the world's creation.

First took place the dividing of light from darkness, thus bringing about the rotation of 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.

The pages of the earth's surface carry in their stratification indelible records harmonizing with this scriptural account 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 that mere man cannot contemplate or accurately estimate its wondrous age.

The fossils of the mammoth reptiles and beasts which lived before the appearance of man on this planet 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 by his inability to co-ordinate this evidence with any measure of time that will fall within the range of human comprehension.

Historians say the world was 4,004 years old before the Christian era, and 1918 years have passed since then, making the age to date 5,922 years. It is not surprising that through the dark ages, dates and facts were lost. 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.

The world certainly is more than 5,922 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, in the tropics, and I don't know how many times it has swung on its pendulum between Frigid, Temperate and Torrid Zones.

We are certain to become lost in a labyrinth of mystery when we take these known facts concerning the earth's age, and try to specify any particular number of millions of years as the old world's age.