OF THE BASIN OF MINAS. 237 
and shingle really form a great diary of the life of the 
Basin, and we see that the history that is daily written 
upon them is readily to be translated. Well, we have got 
our boots and pants well covered with mud, we have 
gathered a handful of specimens of bird tracks and a 
pocket full of muddy shells, and we haye learned some- 
thing of how Nature writes down in her great Stone Book 
the history of the world. Before us are the last few pages 
of the manuscript, and we have watched in the tracks 
left by the running bird, the pen gliding over the page. 
Aye, we too have added our lines to the history. Will 
the coming tide respect them and seal them up forever, 
or will it blot them out as unworthy of a place on the 
page? Behind us and around us in the hills are volumes 
written long ago by the same ever-recording pen; but 
Nature makes palimpsests,as did the scribes of the middle 
ages, and writes over and over on the same page. See, 
yonder at the mouth of the Avon is a range of cliffs called 
Horton Bluff, formed of layers of the lower coal measures. 
They form a chapter in the geological history of the Prov- 
ince, and are written all over with quaint old records of 
ancient forests of coal-plants, and of antique mailed and 
Spine-armed ganoid fish; but the scribe, wanting mate- 
vial on which to record the history of the present, is de- 
stroying the old manuscript, spreading out its leaves anew, 
Te-prepared for the more modern characters in which the 
chapter of to-day is being written. After all our scribe 
is but a chronicler, like ‘ald Froissart. Geologists are 
the historians that work over this material. They are 
hot satisfied with leaving the detached facts recorded, 
but ask the why and the wherefore of their occurrence and 
their relations one to another. One who merely translates 
the detached facts of the geological record is no more 
