Books: Geology

THE STORY OF GEOLOGY—Allan L. Benson—Cosmopolitan ($4).The vast rhythms of the dying stars, the sleepy, dwindling music of the tides, the rigadoons that dinosaurs danced in a primeval sunset, the hungry chisels of rain and wind and river; these are the paraphernalia of geology, the most spectacular, if the most inexact of sciences. Most laymen have no notion of its reaches, beyond a superficial jargon, culled from newssheets, of meaninglessly enormous chunks of time and space. For such laymen as prefer facts to fantasies, Author Benson ably, if condescendingly, puts forward geological facts (e.g.—the air ten miles above the equator is colder than that ten miles above the arctic circle; rainbows are round, so that no fossil-picks are required to apprehend them.)