CHAP. XXXVI.J GEOLOGY OF MILL CREEK. 019 



to co-operate with the ultra-democratic party. Are the priests 

 conscious of having embarked in a common cause with the dema 

 gogue, and that they must, like him, derive their influence from 

 courting the passions, prejudices, and ignorance of the people ? 

 If so, one method alone remains for combating both the removal 

 of ignorance by a well-organized government system of schools, 

 neither under sectarian or ecclesiastical control, nor under the 

 management of any one political party. 



In the city, the New Englanders appeared to me to have lost 

 political weight since we were last here. To show me how 

 seriously the priests interfere in their domestic affairs, a bookseller 

 told me that he had just lost the services of a young shopman 

 who, although a Protestant, like his father, found that his mother, 

 a Catholic, considered it her duty never to let him rest till he 

 adopted some other profession. The priest had told her that he 

 was constantly handling dangerous and heretical books in his store, 

 with which his mind must be contaminated. 



In many of the large towns, in the valley of the Mississippi, 

 the Catholics have established such excellent schools, and enforced 

 discipline so well, that the children of Protestants have been at 

 tracted there, and many have become proselytes ; but I heard of 

 still more Catholics who have become converts to Protestantism, 

 and I can not but believe that Romanism itself will undergo many 

 salutary modifications under the influence of the institutions of this 

 country. 



I made an excursion with Messrs. Buchanan, James, Carley, 

 Clark, and Anthony, to Mill Creek, a tributary valley of the 

 Ohio, where loam and gravel, with fresh-water shells, overlies a 

 deposit of leaves and fossil stems of trees. The shells are of recent 

 species, and the layer of vegetable matter of the same age as that 

 which contains the bones of the mastodon, elephant, megalonyx, 

 and other extinct animals at Big Bone Lick, in Kentucky.* I 

 afterward saw in the city some beautiful collections of Silurian 

 fossils from the blue limestone, and was struck with the dimen 

 sions of some of the trilobites of the genus Isoteles, the most 



* See ante, p. 194, and &quot;Travels in North America,&quot; vol. ii. pp. 62, 

 65, 67. 



