RESURRECTION OF THE CONTINENT 239 



are made to illuminate the dark and mysterious chambers 

 of the fossil realm. 



Reasoning thus, we are forced to the conviction that 

 many of the ancient lakelets have become completely filled. 

 Others are only half filled. Others have had the work com- 

 pleted even "within the memory of the oldest inhabitant." 

 Who is not acquainted with some grassy pond which his 

 father had known as a clear lakelet ? What man is unable 

 to point out some swale that in boyhood he had known as 

 a grassy pond ? or some meadow that he has traversed as 

 an old-time swale ? The work is not ended when the lake- 

 let is filled. The surrounding eminences still continue to 

 afford lime-yielding water, which saturates the muck and 

 deposits its lime ; while vegetation still pays its annual 

 tribute to the accumulating stores, till the solid material 

 becomes sufficient to exclude the excess of water. The an- 

 cient lakelet is at length a finished meadow. Man now 

 steps in and appropriates the annual crop as coolly and 

 unthinkingly, and perhaps as thanklessly, as if kind Nature 

 had not expended a thousand years and infinite pains in 

 fitting it up for his uses. 



The epoch of the resurgence of the continent has been 

 styled the Champlain Epoch of the Post-Tertiary Age. 

 During this epoch existed the mastodon and mammoth, 

 whose ponderous bones and teeth have overstrewn the 

 entire area of our country. Unlike the teeth sown by 

 Cadmus, those of these giant quadrupeds produced no 

 crop, and we are not early enough in our visit to this 

 planet to be gratified by the exhibition of living masto- 

 dons and hairy elephants. 



It was probably also in the earliest part of the Cham- 

 plain Epoch, or even before the full termination of the 

 Glacial Epoch, that man appeared upon the earth. Judg- 

 ing solely from geological data, his appearance in America 



