GEOLOGICAL SUEVEY OF THE TERRITORIES. 339 



Life and beauty were everywhere, and man, the great destroyer, had 

 not yet come; but not all was peace and harmony in this Arcadia. The 

 forces of nature are always at war, and redundant life compels abundant 

 death. The innumerable species of animals and plants had each its 

 hereditary enemy, and the struggle of life was so sharp and bitter that 

 in the lapse of ages many genera and species were blotted out forever. 



The herds of herbivores — which included all the genera now living on 

 the earth's surface, with many strange forms long since extinct — formed 

 the prey of carnivores commensurate to these in power and numbers. 

 The coo of the dove and the whistle of the quail were answered by the 

 scream of the eagle, and the lowing of herds and the bleating of hocks 

 come to the ear of the imagination mingled with the roar of the lion, the 

 howl of the wolf, and the despairing cry of the victim. Yielding to the 

 slow-acting but irresistible forces of nature, each in succession of these 

 various animal for^ms has disappeared till all have passed away or been 

 changed to their modern representatives, while the country they inhab- 

 ited, by the upheaval of its mountains, the deepening of its valleys, the 

 filling and draining of its great lakes has become what it is. 



These changes which. I have reviewed in an hour seem like the swiftly- 

 consecutive pictures of the phantasmagoria or the shifting scenes of the 

 drama, but the seons of time in which they were effected are simply infinite 

 and incomprehensible to us. We have no reason to suppose that terra 

 firma was less firm, or that the order of nature in which no change is 

 recorded within the historic period, was less constant then than now. 

 At the present rate of change — throwing out man's influence — a period 

 infinite to us would be required to revolutionize the climate, flora, and 

 fauna, but there is no evidence that changes were more rapid during the 

 tertiary ages. 



Every day sees something taken from the rocky barrier of Niagara ; 

 and, geologically speaking, at no remote time our great lakes will have 

 shared the fate of those that once existed at the far West. Already they 

 have been reduced to less than half their former area, and the water level 

 has been depressed three hundred feet or more. This process is pretty 

 sure to go until they are completely emptied. 



The cities that now stand upon their banks will, ere that time, have 

 grown colossal in size, then gray with age, then have fallen into decadence 

 and their sites be long forgotten, but in the sediments that are now 

 accumulating in these lake basins will lie many a wreck and skeleton, 

 tree trunk and floated leaf. Near the city sites and old river mouths 

 these sediments will be full of relics that will illustrate and explain the 

 mingled comedy and tragedy of human life. These relics the geologist 

 of the future will doubtless gather and study and moralize over, as we 

 do the records of the tertiary ages. Doubtless he will be taught the 

 same lesson we are, that human life is infinitely short, and human achieve- 

 ment utterly insignificant. Let us hope that this future man, purer in 

 morals and clearer in intellect than we, may find as much to admire in 

 the records of this first epoch of the reign of man as we do in those of 

 the reign of mammals. 



