TJie Geology and Topography of Cincinnati. 141 



From all the facts given in this paper, it is easy to see the in- 

 teresting features of our city's surroundings. The broad, deep 

 stream of the Ohio, which, passing our city in a graceful curve, 

 gives life to many thousand srpiare miles of country, the two gravel 

 terraces, the wonderfully carved plateau, with its diversified aspect of 

 valley and ridge, its deep ravines and its gentle slopes, together with 

 its vast store of fossil remains, famous the world over, these are its 

 attractions. Nor is this all, for, situated on part of the oldest dry 

 land in the Western World, its site can boast an antiquity which 

 puts to shame many more renowned cities. And while New 

 Orleans has been founded upon a soil which is yet saturated 

 with its baptismal shower, Cincinnati has planted herself on rocks 

 hoary with the age of countless centuries ; rocks which form the 

 everlasting hills; rocks which were gray with moss when the site 

 of Louisville was fathoms deep beneath the ocean waves; when 

 that of St. Louis was as yet scarcely even in the process of forma- 

 mation; long before even the grandeur of the Rocky Mountains 

 was revealed to the wondering vault of heaven, or the Mississippi 

 babbled a tiny brooklet among the Archean Mountains of the far 

 north. Thus we can boast an antiquity far greater than many 

 other American cities. And, though the settlement made by man 

 has not yet attained to its hundred years, its foundations date far 

 back into the earliest history of the earth; to a time, compared with 

 which the epoch of man himself, upon our rolling globe, is but the 

 fragment of a minute in the long roll of countless centuries. 



