126 SPARKS FROM A GEOLOGIST'S HAMMER. 



first-born products of primeval refrigeration of a molten 

 globe? There was an earliest land, a dome of lava just 

 cooled from the fiery ab^^ss of molten matter, a film of 

 frozen dolerite or pophyry stretched around the fluent 

 globe, a solid floor on which descended from the gath- 

 ered clouds the waters which formed a sea without a 

 shore. There must have been a time when the surges 

 were first summoned to their work. To assert, with Hall, 

 that it is idle to dream of such a beginning, because, for- 

 sooth, the traces of the morning's work have been ob- 

 literated by the operations of mid-day, is to plunge into 

 the fallacies of a philosophy fashionable in some quar- 

 ters, and narrowly assert that there is no knowledge but 

 that which the senses certify. 



We turn now our thoughts down the stream of time, 

 and note the relics of later revolutions. Not for eternity 

 were laid the floors of the Old Red Sandstone strata which 

 once stretched, perhaps, from the Catskills to Massachu- 

 setts Bay. Not for eternity were reared the Appalachian 

 summits whose elevation celebrated the close of Palaeozoic 

 time. The Catskills are but a pile of horizontal strata; 

 spared by the gigantic denudations which scraped the 

 face of New England to the bone, and washed away a 

 third of the Empire State. The continuation of the Cats- 

 kill strata is discovered again in Pennsylvania, Western 

 New York, Ohio, and Michigan. Who shall undertake to 

 delineate the topography, the drainage, the vegetation, the 

 populations of that ancient New England surface which 

 now lies strown, perhaps, from the bottom of Long Island 

 Sound to the farther shore of New Jersey? Who shall 

 write an epic on the fortunes of that mythical forefather 

 land? The summits of the Alleghanies, geologists tell us, 



