THE GRAND CANON 



to night, proclaiming as with the tongues of 

 angels the natural beauty of death. 



Every building is seen to be a remnant of 

 once continuous beds of sediments, — sand 

 and slime on the floor of an ancient sea, and 

 filled with the remains of animals, — and ev- 

 ery particle of the sandstones and limestones 

 of these wonderful structures to be derived 

 from other landscapes, weathered and rolled 

 and ground in the storms and streams of other 

 ages. And when we examine the escarpments, 

 hills, buttes, and other monimiental masses 

 of the plateau on either side of the canon, we 

 discover that an amount of material has been 

 carried off in the general denudation of the 

 region compared with which even that carried 

 away in the making of the Grand Canon is 

 as nothing. Thus each wonder in sight be- 

 comes a window through which other wonders 

 come to view. In no other part of this conti- 

 nent are the wonders of geology, the records 

 of the world's auld lang syne, more widely 

 opened, or displayed in higher piles. The whole 

 canon is a mine of fossils, in which five thou- 

 sand feet of horizontal strata are exposed in 

 regular succession over more than a thousand 

 square miles of wall-space, and on the adja- 

 cent plateau region there is another series of 

 beds twice as thick, forming a grand geological 



381 



