270 SKETCHES OF CREATION. 



The ancient lake must have reached its arras into Iowa, 

 Northern Indiana, and Southwestern Michigan. 



While the expanse of lacustrine waters was brooding- 

 over the region destined to become a prairie, they busied 

 themselves in strewing over the tombs of pre-glacial germs 

 a bed of mud which should forever prevent a resurrec- 

 tion. Lake sediments themselves inclose no living germs. 

 You will see the seeds of grasses and the fruits of trees, 

 washed in by the recent storm, floating upon the surface, 

 and eventually drifting to the lee-shore. If they ever sink 

 to the bottom, and wrap themselves in the accumulating 

 mud, it is after they have lost their vitality. Sunken and 

 buried, they go to decay. Let a lake be drained, and the 

 bottom remains a naked, barren, parching, shrinking waste. 

 No herbs, or grasses, or trees burst up through the pottery- 

 like surface. But every where, from beds of ancient gla- 

 cial materials, vegetation is bursting forth and announcing 

 itself. Lo, here I am ! speaks the nodding young pine that 

 had been slumbering just beneath the surface through the 

 long and undisputed possession of the deciduous forest 

 which the axe has just mown down. Not so in a lake- 

 bottom. Here are the cerements of the dead, not the 

 wrappings of the slumbering. 



When, therefore, the ancient lake relinquished dominion 

 over Central Illinois, he left a devastated and desolate 

 country. Around the ancient shores of the abandoned 

 area the emerald forest had stood nodding, and blossom- 

 ing, and fruiting, while the inundating lake had washed 

 the slopes down which the oaken and beechen roots de- 

 scended to sip refreshing draughts. Ever since the time 

 when the Atlantic and Pacific last held carnival in the 

 Mississippi Valley, these vigorous trees had stood smiling 

 upon the face of the freshening residuum left in Illinois on 

 the final retreat of the oceans. A resurrected forest had 



