232 SKETCHES OF CREATION. 



will be peacefully annexed to the dominions of the Ameri- 

 can eagle. 



These are events and phenomena whose history reaches 

 down to the present, and whose promises extend into the 

 future. Let us turn back our thoughts for a moment, and 

 reinspect the phenomena and results wrought out by the 

 ocean on occasion of his last supremacy over the land. It 

 seemed, indeed, as if the work of Nature had proved a fail- 

 ure; but this very inundation had been embraced in the 

 plans of infinite Beneficence. I have already alluded to 

 the assorting action exerted upon the loose materials left 

 upon the surface by the retiring glacier. Large portions 

 of the drift were completely worked over, and redeposited 

 under a semi-stratified arrangement. Who has not stood 

 in a railroad-cut through a bank of these materials, and 

 witnessed the bands of variously-colored sands and clays 

 exposed in the walls of the cut ? From such an exposure 

 of the internal structure of these hills and ridges one may 

 learn that they consist of beds of clay of various extent, 

 and variously inclined in reference to each other, between 

 which the spaces are filled up with sand and pebbles. Now 

 this circumstance, accidental as it seems to be, has contrib- 

 uted immensely to human convenience. The rains which 

 fall upon the surface of the earth percolate through the 

 superficial layers of sand and gravel, but always, sooner or 

 later, reach one of these strata of clay, by which the farther 

 downward progress of the water is arrested. Upon the top 

 of such a bed of clay the water accumulates. It saturates 

 the overlying sands. It is true that it will slowly follow 

 the descent of the clay bed, and will reach its margin, and 

 begin another descent. It will soon be arrested again in 

 a similar manner, and will form a deeper-seated reservoir, 

 which in turn will overflow and contribute to a third. 

 Thus every clayey stratum, whether of great or small ex- 



