as illustrating the Geology of North America. 19 



support of the Scripture statement; and last, though not 

 least, from the above phaenomena of the greatest of known 

 cataracts ; and I shall look with some anxiety for a simple 

 and consistent refutation of the subject of this paper. Jn the 

 mean time I must confess my own complete conviction of the 

 importance of these facts to the science of geology. We 

 everywhere hear of the immense periods, amounting to millions 

 of years, in which geologists seem to delight to revel. We 

 hear of a time when the mighty Mastodon and the gigantic 

 Mammoth, as well as other animals now supposed to be ex- 

 tinct, lived and died upon the very spots in which we now 

 find their remains in a shattered and detached state ; we find, 

 upon the same authorities, that the great plains of the Ame- 

 rican continent must have been thickly peopled by these in- 

 teresting animals ; and we derive a sort of mysterious plea- 

 sure in diving into the recesses of past times, and in pic- 

 turing to the imagination the state of the present lands of the 

 earth at periods supposed to be far anterior to the creation of 

 the human, or of most of the existing animal, races. In the 

 midst of these pleasing day-dreams we are often disturbed by 

 the contradictory and stubborn facts which are from time to 

 time brought to light in opposition to them ; and to crown 

 the whole, we find our magnificent ideas of the former state 

 of the American continent threatened with sudden and com- 

 plete annihilation, by the evidence of Niagara against the very 

 existence of the plains of that continent above the surface of the 

 ocean before the Mosaic Deluge. 



To such, however, as have viewed this important subject 

 in the light shed upon it, with a steady and distinct illumina- 

 tion, by Scripture, this remarkable result is but a new and 

 powerful link in the mighty chain of facts which, however 

 shaken, can never be broken. Our minds are preoccupied 

 with a certain set of theoretical data, upon which the most 

 glaring, though opposing, facts appear, too often, to have 

 little or no influence. Such facts must, however, exert, sooner 

 or later, an increasing force, and must in time lead to a more 

 consistent and natural (not to say Scriptural) view of things. 

 Here, for instance, is a fact which seems to bear its own date 

 and history on its front with almost as much distinctness as 

 if they had been written in letters of brass, and intended for 

 an index to the period when the present surface of this and 

 many other secondary countries first issued from their parent 

 deep. We have only to cast a glance over the nature of the 

 great American plains to be convinced that this is the case. 

 These vast steppes extend from the western slope of the Al- 

 leghany mountains to the sand plains, a distance of 1500 



D2 



