128 SPARKS PROM A GEOLOGIST'S HAM3IER. 



types in waters bordered by forests of plane-trees, poplars, 

 and a multitude of other forms already assuming the as- 

 pects of the finished age of the world. This ancient home 

 of vegetable and animal life spread over the States of Ohio, 

 and Indiana, and Illinois, and Kentuck}^, and all the re- 

 gion contiguous to these. River channels were dug whose 

 very locations we seek in vain. Cities and villages and 

 verdant farms now stand upon sites above which waved a 

 somber forest whose every trace has been wiped from the 

 face of the continent, while the very soil in which their 

 roots were bedded has been transported to the Gulf of 

 Mexico. Those broad and fertile plains performed their 

 part in the history of terrestrial preparations, and like 

 the pictures on the lithographer's stone, they have been 

 completely erased, to be succeeded by the next scene in the 

 succession of continental landscapes. 



There was an ancient surface on which was growing 

 the cinnamon, the plane-tree, the magnolia, and other 

 tropical and sub- tropical forest-growths. It stretched 

 from the borders of the Atlantic to the slopes of the Pa- 

 cific, and from the Mexican Gulf to the shores of the frozen 

 ocean. It was the American continent now first extend- 

 ing its limbs after a protracted embryonic growth. We 

 are not positively informed whether to the east of the 

 Mississippi this continent was the continuation in time of 

 that which resulted from the chans^es closinsr the Carbon- 

 iferous Age; but we well know, since Dr. Newberry's 

 explorations, that in the far west, over the Colorado plains, 

 was a vast region which had but recently emerged from 

 the bed of ocean waters.* Here lies the " o-reat central 



*J. S. Newberry, in Ives' Colorado ErxiedUion. See later and more de- 

 tailed information in the government reports, especially the Atlas of Colorado, 



