WILL THE MOUNTAINS BE LEVELED? 399 



stately river is floating off the land not noisily, but sul 

 lenly and angrily, as if the waters had some great wrong 

 to avenge upon the land. And all these filchings from the 

 mountain and the plain are restored again to the sea. Old 

 Ocean is receiving back his own. The rivers are his allies, 

 and right faithfully do they forage to supply the cravings 

 of his insatiate maw. 



We witness such work in progress during the brief mo 

 ment of our tarry upon the earth. We look back along 

 this line of operations, and discern for the first time the gi 

 gantic results which have already been achieved by the 

 wearing agency of waters. Not during the lifetime of 

 Adam s race alone, but during the age of quadrupeds which 

 preceded him through the dynasty of reptiles, still more 

 ancient, have these denuding forces been ceaselessly en 

 gaged in scraping, and gouging, and scarring the face of 

 Nature. River-beds have been deeply excavated and again 

 obliterated by a plethora of rubbish poured forward by 

 some more gigantic operation. Lake basins have been 

 scooped out Niagara gorges dug square miles of land, 

 with its underlying rocky floors, have been swept away. 

 From the summits of the Catskill Mountains the Old Red 

 Sandstone once stretched eastward perhaps to Massachu 

 setts Bay. The powers of water have strewn it over Long 

 Island Sound, and far to the seaward of Sandy Hook. The 

 Cumberland Table-land once reached a hundred and fifty 

 miles westward over the basin of Middle Tennessee. The 

 site whereon the city of Nashville now stands was once a 

 thousand feet beneath the level of the land. Half a state 

 was scraped away to extend the borders of Mississippi and 

 Alabama. The Alleghanies, in their prime, were three thou 

 sand feet higher than human eyes have ever seen them. 

 Their ancient summits are sunken in the Atlantic and the 

 Gulf of Mexico. The Great American Desert was once as 



