344 SKETCHES OF CREATION. 



action around the shores of the great lakes. Even mimic 

 oceans like these, in the era of their strength, have per- 

 formed labors which excite our astonishment. And that 

 Titanic power which geology dimly pictures to us as mov- 

 ing in glacier-masses from parallel to parallel, riding ever 

 primeval forests, obliterating ancient river-beds, plowing 

 out lake-basins to the depth of nine hundred feet, and 

 crushing to powder countless cubic miles of obdurate 

 granite and quartz — that power of which we can little more 

 than dream, though the records of its marvelous march are 

 scattered about on every side — a power which may have 

 been summoned into exercise at more than one period in 

 the world's history — that power whose movement was re- 

 sistless as fate, and destructive as the crash of worlds, can 

 serve at least to impress our minds with the energy of geo- 

 logical agencies, and the resources at Nature's hand for the 

 scooping of lake-basins, the carving of mountain cliffs, or 

 the scraping out of the bowels of the State of Tennessee. 



Even the humble river-stream — humble by comparison, 

 but terrific as Niagara in unwasting and untiring power — 

 has accomplished work at which the highest human engi- 

 neering stands appalled. The Kentucky and the Cumber- 

 land, in traversing the states which they drain, have worn 

 their channels to the depth of hundreds of feet below the 

 general level of the country. Some of the wildest and 

 most attractive scenery of the continent lies along the 

 Kentucky, from the mouth of Hickman's Creek in Garrard 

 County, to Dix River and Coger's Ferry in Mercer County. 

 Even the smallest streams have aped the pretentious labors 

 of the larger, and have succeeded in opening their narrower 

 gorges through two, three, and four hundred feet of the 

 blue limestone of the blue-grass lands of Kentucky and 

 Tennessee. 



But these all are pigmy works compared with those of 



