58 The Willamette Sound. 



the shells of most of them are neither broken 

 apart nor water-worn as they would be if 

 drifted here from some other locality. They 

 evidently lie here as fossils on the same bed 

 they occupied while living, and oysters then, 

 as now, rarely bed in waters more than a few 

 feet in depth. The common cockle another 

 lover of shoal water is also abundant among 

 these remains, and, like the oyster, lies fossil 

 where it lived, the opposite valves often occu- 

 pying the very positions, relatively, that they 

 held while living. So, too, with the mem- 

 bers of the clam family; whether Mactra or 

 Solen or Venus, all are evidently in their na- 

 tive beds where they lived and died. We 

 conclude that when these shell fish lived, the 

 surrounding waters held nearly their present 

 level. 



Another truth plainly taught in these 

 stratified bluffs is this: the waters here be- 

 came afterward much higher, or speaking 

 more exactly, the land became much lower. 

 There must have been a change of more than 

 one hundred feet, for a stratified sediment of 



