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6,000 feet, and you have under you, nearly all the way, tertiary formations 
pretty evenly spread over the whole district. These tertiary formations 
are a little tilted when you come to the Rocky Mountains. Over these 
formations there is spread, for hundreds and thousands of miles, a layer 
of gravel, and above the gravel a layer of brick earth, both together consti- 
tuting the gravel period. .From the Missouri up to the Rocky Mountains, and 
up and down the river Missouri for thousands of miles, you tread upon deep 
gravel — at least deep brick-earth and gravel, lying upon the tertiary. Now, 
it is almost unaccountable that the gravel on the Rocky Mountains should be 
like some ill-assorted couple, — May and December, — that there should be one 
epoch on the one side and another on the other ; that it should be extremely 
old on the one side, and but reasonably old on the other. It is quite out of 
the question to conceive that that is the case. That is the first thing that 
strikes one ; and the other is, that in following up the abundant gold gravel 
deposits in that magnificent country I can perceive nothing, except in the 
enormous scale of things, different from that which abounds in Switzerland 
and in our own country. You have a gravel which is laid out over the 
district, becoming fine as it is at a distance from the mountains, and 
becoming coarse as it is near the mountains, and which Is laid out as running 
water will lay out gravel ; and this process is evidently going on now, the 
course of streams being constantly changed by the operations of the gold- 
diggers. But underneath that gravel, which is mastodon gravel, no doubt, 
and which contains the implements of which we have heard, I found a 
tumultuous mass of boulder gravels, which, if we had seen them in this 
country or in Europe, we should have attributed to the action of ice. Not 
only did we find these gravels, but we found very numerous basins and 
terraces cut out, giving proof of the enormous power of water in a 
paroxysmal manner, operating far more suddenly than anything we have 
instance of now ; so that we have presented to us the same state of 
phenomena as we have in Europe, and I do not know any reason for 
calling the one tertiary and the other post-glacial. Then as to the 
excavations for mines. There are old excavations for mines spotted over 
nearly the whole of this district, which clearly indicates that the early 
inhabitants derived their gold from diggings, as the Cornish people did their 
tin from the streams. They found it in the same gravel at the bottom of 
the mud. In Cornwall, in the same situation, we find deer-horns and 
the remains of man; and at first you would say, “Well, man must have 
lived at that epoch, upon that floor, when that tin was deposited ; but, beyond 
a doubt, these were the remains of the men who were the workers of the tin,” 
but they are all transported or transposed remains, from a more modern 
surface. And so, the extraordinary jumble that you get in the Rocky 
Mountains, by reason of the enormous rush of the streams down those 
gulches and canons, really accounts for everything with regard to the 
position of these things ; for, if the implements had been here this year, 
they would have been there the next, and somewhere else the following 
