164 WALKS AND TALKS. 



into the midst of a sleeping, dreamy Golgotha, descended 

 from the vast dead past. How old are these graves? Through 

 how many winter storms have these silent skeletons slept here ? 

 How they rise, story above story. These bottom tiers lay 

 down to their long repose while the great lake flapped its 

 waves above. Its fishes swam over cemeteries. Other 

 mute remains came in, layer by layer, to the house of sileoce, 

 and the hand of Nature carefully envaulted them. The re- 

 ceptacle was filled; the lake had vanished; the continent 

 was here. 



Life once thrilled through all these torpid frames. These 

 were conscious creatures. These were joyous creatures walk- 

 ing on the green earth. These were beings which inhaled 

 the vital air, and basked in the life-giving sunlight, and en- 

 joyed each other's society. They fed on the productions of 

 the forest and the glade. They wandered over a land which 

 was to be Dakota and Nebraska. They slaked their thirst at 

 the border of the wide lake; they cooled themselves in its 

 waters, and sometimes sported with its waves. Death came to 

 them, as to their thousands of predecessors as it comes to us. 

 They were mired in a slough; they were hunted in a jungle ; 

 they lay down in the shade of a friendly tree ; some force of 

 nature bore them to their burial. The lake was their tomb, 

 and the lake preserved its trust. It was a later vicissitude 

 which opened the cemetery and exposed these testimonies of a 

 vanished age to the curious and irreverent scrutiny of science. 



The formation in which these creatures are entombed 

 stretches from eastern Nebraska to Laramie, and from the 

 Cheyenne River, Dakota, into north-western Kansas. It is 

 called Neocene or Upper Tertiary. Other smaller areas of 

 the same exist in Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, and Nevada. 

 A very large area exists also in Oregon and Washington Ter- 

 ritory. Upper Tertiary strata also border the Gulf of Mexico, 

 from Mobile to the Rio Grande, stretching inland a hum I ml 

 miles, and up the valley of the Mississippi to Cairo. Near 

 the gulf shore, however, and along the Delta of the Mi>~i>- 

 sippi the Neocene is concealed by alluvial deposits. Neocene 



