Silurian, Devonian, Carboniferous, Permian,
Triassic, etc., are piled one upon another, and we can get a glimpse of
their internal relations only where some rent has laid them open, or
where their ragged edges, worn away by the abrading action of external
influences, expose to view their successive layers, it must, of course,
be more difficult to follow their connection. For this reason the
American continent offers facilities to the geologist denied to him in
the so-called Old World, where the earlier deposits are comparatively
hidden, and the broken character of the land, intersected by mountains
in every direction, renders his investigation still more difficult.
Of course, when I speak of the geological deposits as so completely
unveiled to us here, I do not forget the sheet of drift which covers the
continent from North to South, and which we shall discuss hereafter,
when I reach that part of my subject. But the drift is only a
superficial and recent addition to the soil, resting loosely above the
other geological deposits, and arising, as we shall see, from very
different causes.

In this article I have intended to limit myself to a general sketch of
the formation of the Laurentian Hills with the Azoic stratified beds
resting against them. In the Silurian epoch following the Azoic we have
the first beach on which any life stirred; it extended along the base of
the Azoic beds, widening by its extensive deposits the narrow strip of
land already upheaved. I propose in my next article to invite my readers
to a stroll with me along that beach.

* * * * *

PERICLES AND PRESIDENT LINCOLN.

Ancient history is forever indispensable to the speculative historian.
The ground of its value is the very fact of its antiquity; by which
we mean, not simply distance in time, but distance as the result of
separate construction,--distance as between two systems of reality, each
orbicularly distinct from the other. One system--that with which our
destiny is concurrent--is still flying its rounds in space; the other
has whirled itself out of space, and through a maze of scattered myths
and records, into human remembrances. This latter system, though
hermetically sealed to the realities of outward existence, still, and
by this very exclusion from all practical uses, becomes of paramount
interest to the philosophic historian; indeed, it is only because the
shadowy planets of the ancient cycle still re