130 MISSOURI STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



THE EED OAKS OF THE LOESS HILLS. 



BY W. R. LAUGHLIN, ELM GROVE, MO. 



Beautiful, srand, homely Loess Hills of Missouri. Children of the 

 glacier and the currents. The granites blocked out when the Titans- 

 heaved up the longest mountain chain of earth are here, unchanged — 

 almost unworn. 



The pebble that was loosened by the foot of the wild goat, far 

 above the timber line on the backbone of the continent, thousands of 

 years after the upheaval, is here. 



The vast variety of material that through ages crush and wear and 

 wash, have brought from the ten thousand times ten thousand hills- 

 and the vast plains that make up the basin of the upper Missouri, are 

 here. 



Iron and lime and magnesia, carbonates, phosphates, alkalis and 

 acids, ground out by the torents, shifted by the blizzards, mixed in the 

 great sluice-box of the Missouri river and its branches, laid down to 

 rest together in the bed of the fresh water lake that was so much 

 larger than is Lake Superior. Is^o, not to rest, for chemical action 

 knows no rest. They solved and dissolved each other. They ate each 

 other up, and, lo ! new creations. The mollusk and the fish and the 

 reptile and the water plants did their work of mixing the material of 

 the mud bed laboratory. 



A multitude of forms left themselves for us to find in the rocks of 

 to-day — -a written history that lacks but little save the power to tell us^ 

 how long each stage and how long ago all. The currents and the- 

 waves built the strata from the shore line to the center, into a wonder- 

 ful variety of forms but ever of changed materials — now a heavy bed 

 or a thin layer of stone — limestone, sandstone, shale or the nondescript 

 hard black deposit that seems to have witin it neither fossil nor struc- 

 ture to tell us of its building, nor any usefulness to commend it to the 

 human race. 



Gradually the rim that held in the lake wore away — gradually the 

 waters lowered; and along our bluffs may yet be seen the shore lines- 

 that were marked by the waves at each step of that receding. The 



