Familiar Talks on Science

A stone in the road is an obstacle to one passerby; cracked open with a hammer, it becomes a page from the earth’s oldest history.

Writing in the late nineteenth century, Elisha Gray invites ordinary readers to look beneath the familiar surface of the world. In conversational talks on geology and the forces that shape the earth, he follows the clues preserved in rock: tilted layers, mountain ranges, and traces of ancient life. The challenge is to learn to see what a stone can tell us—not merely how it was made, but how the land beneath our feet took form across ages beyond counting. What story is written in the rocks under your own path?

With centuries of literature, it's inevitable that some will fall through the cracks. We hunt down public domain works and restore them so they're not lost to the world.

Who are we? We're Cairn Press. Our background is in design, publishing, typography, and technology. These skills fuel our mission to create the highest quality Public Domain eBooks available online, at an affordable price. We give them the treatment they deserve; our proprietary process restores books for a better overall user experience in design, readability, and e-reader compatibility.