I. 
AMERICA THE OLD WORLD. 
I CIEST-BORN among the Continents, though 
- so much later in culture and civilization than 
some of more recent birth, America, so far as her 
physical history is concerned, has been falsely de- 
nominated the New World. Hers was the first dry 
land lifted out of the waters, hers the first shore 
washed by the ocean that enveloped all the earth 
beside ; and while Europe was represented only 
by islands rising here and there above the sea, 
America already stretched an unbroken line of 
land from Nova Scotia to the Far West.* 
In the present state of our knowledge, our con- 
clusions respecting the beginning of the earth’s 
history, the way in which it took form and shape 
as a distinct, separate planet, must, of course, be 
very vague and hypothetical. Yet the progress 
* It would be inexpedient to encumber these pages with ref- 
erences to all the authorities */n which such geological results 
rest. They are drawn from the various State Surveys, including 
that of the mineral lands of Lake Superior, in which the early 
rise of the American Continent is for the first time affirmed, and 
other more general works on American geology. 
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