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...