Work in the Dakota Group 3 



from the limestone strata of the region with what- 

 ever tools were at hand, but they were admired 

 chiefly as examples of the wonderful power of 

 running water to carve rocks into the semblance of 

 shells. Or if one of the more observant remarked 

 that these shells looked very much as if they had 

 been alive once, the only theory that would account 

 for their presence and yet sustain the belief that the 

 world was only six thousand years old, was that the 

 Almighty, who created the rocks, could easily, at 

 the same time, have created the ancient plants and 

 animals as fossils, just as they were found. 



I remember a rich find I made in the garret of an 

 uncle in Ames, New York, a cradle filled with 

 fossil shells and crystals of quartz. They had been 

 collected by my uncle's brother, who, fortunately, 

 as my uncle said, had died early, before bringing 

 disgrace upon the family by wasting his time wan- 

 dering over the hills and gathering stones. All the 

 large specimens he had collected had been thrown 

 away, and the smaller ones in the old cradle had 

 long been forgotten. I was welcome to all my 

 uncle's buggy could carry when he took me home, 

 and I can never forget the joy of going over that 

 material again and again, selecting the specimens 

 that appealed most to my sense of the beautiful and 

 the wonderful. I labeled them all " From Uncle 

 James," and it greatly astonished a dear aunt of 



