56 The Willamette Sound. 



uniform thickness, now worn away above into 

 a rolling surface, yet showing everywhere a 

 fine persistence in the old water lines that 

 ruled its formation. Buried in this mass of 

 sediment, and occasionally cropping out in 

 exposed sections, are vast beds of sea shells. 

 So completely do these represent the life now 

 around them that when an apparently excep- 

 tional form does appear, memory at once re- 

 calls having seen it somewhere on the coast. 

 And yet, identical in species as these shells 

 unquestionably are with those now living in 

 the surrounding waters, the two sets of condi- 

 tions are separated by the whole import of the 

 term "fossil." The waters that buried there 

 those fossil shells, and covered them with one 

 hundred or more vertical feet of ocean sedi- 

 ment, were waters that so defined our north- 

 ern coast as to give it a far different outline 

 from that of its present geography. 



In some of these bluff exposures their past 

 record is read in masses of buried forest trees 

 trunk, leaves and seed so buried in clay and 

 so well preserved that the spruce cone, fragile 



