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Show 158, :he Sierra from all these points of view. But each of these perspectives is finally limited, because ill represent a human criterion of use. Muir hoped that his :onception of the Sierra as sculpture would turn attention toward its genesis and structure. It was not simply scenery, a playground, or a soil factory. Certainly it was not a collection of sterile monuments. As it created itself, nothing was wasted or a byproduct. No part of the wilderness was accidental. So much depends on how one imagines the earth's past. For Muir, the glacial history of the Sierra was a peaceful, harmonious era. His vision of genesis differed markedly from the biblical version. Just as he found residual glaciers, "lingering beneath cool shadows, silently completing the sculpture of the summit peaks," so he imagined the glacial past of the Sierra as "tender snowflowers, noiselessly falling through unnumbered seasons, the offspring of the sun and sea." The glaciers were more than the gouges of the "Master Builder." They were the plows of God, the great soil makers and distributors, They blessed the earth and created the form that a tree of life would one day fill. How could Muir see their reign as anything but harmonious? When he attempted to imagine the glacial history of the Sierra in peaceful terms, he was trying to avoid a major scientific controversy o f the day, between what are called the Catastrophists and the Uniformitarians, represented by Louis Agassiz and Sir Charles Lyell. Modern geology accepts a |