The purpose of this booklet is to provide you the basic understanding of geology. Geology has the benefit of being a solid science that you can actually get your hands on. Consider previous fields in this series. Math is a bunch of ideas. Physics deals with invisible forces. Really! Chemistry more or less runs through one's fingers like water. Unless, of course, it's a gas.
But you can put a rock in your pocket. There is something gratifying about that. I mean, rocks can even be in the form of some idealized Pythagorean solid. That's better than Pythagoras ever did.
Of course, the minute you want to talk about the rock geologists launch into a mind-boggling discussion of unfathomable time periods extending into practically infinite numbers that make no sense to anyone except geologists. But it is still comforting to know that a rock is still a rock, and you can skip it on the water or sling it with a sling.
Another admirable feature of geologists, if not of the field, is that most of them are somewhat taciturn. No, that's not a mineral type. That's a person who doesn't talk much. That may be an unfair overgeneralization, but so is the Paleozoic. Still, I get along with them better than I do the other types previously discussed in this series. We can at least share an appreciation of fossil animals. I think there are fossil plants also, but I've never really bothered to find out being a zoologist.
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