132 SKETCHES OF CREATION. 



other southern regions more remote from the northern 

 source of the sediments the rocks of the age are represent- 

 ed by the "Mountain Limestone." [See Appendix, Note 

 IV.] 



I am here led to direct the reader's attention to an im- 

 portant law which has governed the distribution of sedi 

 ments in all the periods of American paleozoic history. 

 The continent, it will be remembered, was always toward 

 the north. Soundings in the North Atlantic indicate that 

 the actual foundations of the continent extend northeast- 

 ward beneath the water far beyond the limits of the exist- 

 ing land. Far back in the antiquity of our continent the 

 Labrador branch possessed an extent which no longer ap- 

 pears. It projected itself in that direction almost to mid- 

 ocean. It has been eaten up by the waves of the Atlantic. 

 The bones of the continent lie scattered along from the 

 " Grand Banks" to Maine. Newfoundland, Cape Breton, 

 Nova Scotia, and the numberless islands and peninsulas of 

 th.e northeast coast, are the remnants of the meal which 

 old Ocean has made of the right wing of America. Out 

 of the wasted continent of paleozoic times the agencies of 

 Nature have built up the substructures of the Northern 

 United States. All the strata to which I have referred 

 were formed of the ruins of rocks that had long before 

 been dry land. Thus the materials came from the north- 

 east. And thus it happens that every formation is coarser 

 in that direction, and finer toward the centre of the conti- 

 nent. Thus even the age which witnessed the accumula- 

 tion of pebbles or sand at the East, witnessed the deposi- 

 tion of a fine calcareous mud in the deeper, quieter waters 

 which rested over the Mississippi Valley (compare Fig. 15). 



Another thought introduces itself into the company of 

 this one. It is the law of the secular recurrence of iden- 

 tical lithological conditions. This law attracted my atten- 



