250 WALKS AND TALKS. 



the slopes where Otozo'um breakfasted ; the stony slabs will be 

 split apart, and there will be found, in all their details, the 

 same footprints made in this opening epoch of the Middle 

 Ages of the continent's history. 



So the years rolled on ; and meantime the vegetable king- 

 dom was performing its part in the drama of the world. There 

 must have been lowlands where water-loving trees stood and 

 bathed their feet swamps, where fallen foliage and worn-out 

 tree trunks gathered themselves in beds of peat that hardened 

 into coal. One of those tracts is a few miles west of Rich- 

 mond, Virginia; and two others are in the Deep River and 

 Dan River regions of North Carolina. Good coal was 

 formed, quite similar to the bituminuous coal of the Carbonif- 

 erous Age. 



The Triassic Age came to a close through movements of a 

 nature similar to those which closed the Carboniferous, but 

 less pronounced in violence. The sandy beds were disturbed 

 and tilted, all the way from Nova Scotia to North Carolina. 

 The strains which they suffered caused great fractures which 

 intersected the formation in straight lines; and from below 

 came molten mineral matter which filled the fissures. The 

 matter was of a basaltic character, and in places where it 

 overflowed on an extensive scale, it assumed a columnar struc- 

 ture. We note especially four regions of Triassic sandstones 

 and Triassic eruptions : Western Nova Scotia, the Connecti- 

 cut Valley, the Palisade region, extending through New 

 Jersey and Pennsylvania, four others in Virginia, and two 

 in North Carolina. The coarse Potomac marble is from the 

 lower part of the Trias. 



It is now the middle part of the Mesozoic ./Eon. We are 

 in the midst of the reign of reptiles. This dynasty is even 

 more pronounced than was the reign of fishes. From the 

 thought of a reptile we shrink away. To pronounce a man a 

 reptile is to bury him beneath contempt. Think of the rep- 

 tiles which we know crawling, skulking, lazy creatures, all 

 all save the agile lizard. But now, in this reign of reptiles, 

 we find an enlargement and diversification of the type which 



