OBLITERATED CONTINENTS. 



npHE mute and inanimate rocks, to one who questions 

 *- them, are rich in teaching and suggestions. They 

 speak not; they bear no record in any human language; 

 yet, in reason's ear, they are vocal with instruction; to 

 reason's eye they are all luminous with the thought which 

 beams from the hieroglyphics inscribed upon their pages. 

 It is a further lesson of wastage which we propose now 

 to study. The rocks are not imperishable; and theii 

 very disappearance is a text for reflection. I stand be- 

 neath a beetling cliff, perchance the beetling sandstone 

 cliffs of Chautauqua county, in New York, or of the " Pict- 

 ured Rocks" at Lake Superior, or, perchance, those banded 

 and variegated courses of crumbling masonry which wall 

 in the valley of the Upper Mississippi, and there I per- 

 ceive not only that a portion of the rocky mass has been 

 removed, but also that which remains is merely the de- 

 bris, the ruins, of some former rock or rocks which were 

 ground to fragments to build up the foundation which 

 constitutes these massive walls and these overstretching 

 shelters. If I scrutinize any of these cliffs, I find them 

 composed of grains of sand. It is a quartz sand. In those 

 words I imply that a quartz rock has at some time been 

 broken into fine fragments. Some agency has assorted the 

 fragments and brought the finer ones together here, in 

 these magnificent ranges of sandstone precipices, in these 



