310 SKETCHES OF CREATIOK 



deep ocean's bed has ever been the deep ocean's bed, and 

 that the first ridge of land was the nucleus of the conti- 

 nent, and the trend of its shores a prophecy of the coast- 

 lines of our day ? 



Here, then, immeasurable ages before the creation of 

 man — before even a living thing had crawled in the wa- 

 ters of the sea — Nature had distinctly staked out the birth- 

 place of American freedom, and fenced in one inclosure the 

 vast area between the Atlantic and the Pacific — between 

 the great lakes and the Mexican Gulf — and forebore to 

 raise a single separating barrier from one extreme of the 

 empire of freedom to the other. And, through all the 

 chances of following revolutions, she has never erected an 

 Alpine boundary to thwart her purpose in the unity of the 

 continent. 



By successive upheavals belt after belt was added to 

 the area of the land. Even a phase of continental history 

 which seems somewhat exceptional was wrought out by 

 the strictest adherence to the established methods. When 

 the time arrived for the creation of land animals, the shrink- 

 age of the nucleus had proceeded to a point which sub- 

 jected the crust to the most enormous lateral pressures. 

 Uneasy in every attitude, it maintained a perpetual oscilla- 

 tion — I say perpetual, though in movements so vast a hun- 

 dred years are as a moment. Vegetation, which was ap- 

 pointed the scavenger of the atmosphere, gathered up its 

 freight of carbon, and a well-timed subsidence of the sur- 

 face inundated the carbonaceous accumulation, and buried 

 it in mud and sand far from the reach of the destroying 

 influence of the atmosphere. A hundred times the process 

 was repeated; and so it happened that when the atmos- 

 phere was purified, the tension of the crust could be no 

 longer borne, and one grand convulsion rolled up the Ap- 

 palachians in their hundred folds ; and there, nicely assort- 



