THE TOOTH OF TIME. 341 



I ascend to the cupola of the magnificent state-house at 

 Nashville, and take a survey of the surrounding country. 

 On every side spread out the broadly undulating fields of 

 grass and corn into the illimitable distance. A finer agri- 

 cultural scene was never witnessed. A more beautiful 

 landscape, diversified with broad clearings, waving crops, 

 tufts of magnolia and poplar, shining mansions, withdraw- 

 ing vales, and purple atmosphere, it has never been my 

 privilege to gaze upon. What is the substratum of all this 

 beauty of form and landscape ? Descending to the ground, 

 I find myself standing again upon the opened sepulchres 

 of Lower Silurian populations. I go down to the bank of 

 the Cumberland, and view the sharp-cut walls which frown 

 above the muddy current a hundred feet below. Here is a 

 deep perpendicular gorge chiseled by the river through 

 the marble strata of the Trenton and Cincinnati groups. 

 I set out upon an exploration of the charming country 

 mapped before me from the dome of the Capitol. Travel- 

 ing eastward for sixty miles, I pass continuously over an 

 undulating exposure of the same strata. Here I find an 

 outer wall four hundred feet high, which bounds this mag- 

 nificent basin of Middle Tennessee on every side (Fig. 95). 

 I climb to the top of this wall, and ascertain that it is at 

 this point, the western termination of a series of overlying 

 strata of Silurian and Devonian age, which to the west 

 have been swept away, but toward the east form an ele- 

 vated plateau, through which the streams have scored deep 

 gorges four hundred feet down to the level of the central 

 basin. 



This " highland rim," as my scientific friend, Professor 

 Safford, styles it, is forty miles wide. We come then to 

 the foot of the Cumberland Mountains — or, more properly, 

 Cumberland Table-land — and ascend a thousand feet over 

 the outcropping edges of Lower Carboniferous strata, and 



