LAST SUBMERSION AND EMERGENCE OF SOUTHEASTERN KANSAS. 479 



whole country, indeed, has been denuded for, at least, from fifty to two hundred 

 feet in vertical thickness, leaving the more impregnable mounds and cliffs, the 

 pebble beds, and broad plains and valleys, standing monuments to bear witness 

 to the general destruction which, in a past age, took place. The power which 

 caused it must have been great and persistent, and can only be determined by 

 the evidence it has itself left impressed on the field of its operations, and which 

 if correctly read, will, unerringly, lead to its detection. This reading points 

 clearly and unmistakably to water aggregated in broad and shallow seas as the 

 author of the stupendous work. The deposits of pebbles, clays, and soils, the 

 great landslides, the mounds, cliffs, and terraces, and the inclination of the dis- 

 turbed rocks, marking the country so persistently and conspicuously, could have 

 been caused in no other way. 



These seas were, no doubt, connected with an ocean, or deeper and more 

 extended waters, lying to the southward and /westward; but at what era of geo- 

 logical time is somewhat uncertain, except that we know it must have occurred 

 since the carboniferous age, for the upper coal measures and Permian rocks are 

 those destroyed. 



Co-extensive with this area of devastation, as far as I have had an oppor- 

 tunity to examine it, and, I presume, co-extensive with its entire limits, there is 

 scattered over the country, resting upon the surface or buried under the recent 

 alluvial deposits, silicified wood which grew at a time intermediate between the 

 carboniferous vegetation and our recent forests. The carboniferous wood is in- 

 variably imbedded in the stratified rocks, while this intermediate wood is invari- 

 ably upon the surface, as resting under recent alluvial, or vegetable deposits. 

 This would indicate that portions of Kansas, at least, were covered with forests 

 at the time this widespread destruction began, and subsequent to the carbonifer- 

 ous age, portions of which must have been swept away and destroyed by the 

 submergence of the country, while other portions of it, where the conditions 

 were favorable, were silicified in the mineral waters of the seas and left scattered 

 over the old sea-bed, in positions at or near where it is now found, when the 

 land for the last time, in southeastern Kansas, emerged from the water. 



The petrified remains of this intermediate forest, when its limits are fully 

 known, may give some clue to the time of this era of denudation. To the west- 

 ward, in the region of middle Kansas, the bones of species of animals now^living, 

 and the remains of man, have been found buried under alluvial deposits^ of wide 

 occurrence, and at considerable depth below the surface. If the intermediate 

 fossil wood should be found, as it probably will be, associated with ^these ^buried 

 remains, it will render the probability great that this era of waste was^ compara- 

 tively recent, and that man may have reposed under the shade of the forests 

 which preceded it, and which were involved in its devastations. But there is an 

 equal probability that it may have occurred at an earlier date of the world's 

 history. 



This last era of submersion in Kansas seems to have been one of destruc- 

 ion, for no fossil remains of sea-life seem to have been left to indicate the age of 



