on]

In the Tertiaries we see the dawn of the present condition of things,
not only in the character of the animals and plants, but in the height
of the mountains and in the distribution of land and sea.

Let us give a glance at the continents whose growth we have been
following, and see what these more recent geological epochs have done
for their completion. In Europe they have filled the basin in Central
France, and converted all that region into dry land: they have filled
also the channel between France and Spain; they have united Central
Russia with the rest of Europe by the completion of Poland, and have
greatly enlarged Austria and Turkey; they have completed the
promontories of Italy and Greece, and have converted the inland sea at
the foot of the Jura into the plain of Switzerland. But this fruitful
period in the progress of the world, when the character of organic life
was higher and the physical features of the earth more varied than ever
before, was not without its storms and convulsions. The Pyrenees, the
Apennines, the Alps, and with them the whole range of the Caucasus and
Himalayas, were raised either immediately after the Cretaceous epoch, or
in the course of the Tertiaries. Indeed, with this most significant
passage in her history, Europe acquired all her essential characters.
There remained, it is true, much to be done in what is called by
geologists "modern times." The work of the artist is not yet finished
when his statue is blocked out and the grand outline of his conception
stands complete; and there still remained, after the earth was rescued
from the water, after her framework of mountains was erected, after her
soil was clothed with field and forest, processes by which her valleys
were to be made more fruitful, her gulfs to be filled with the rich
detritus poured into them by the rivers, her whole surface to be
rendered more habitable for the higher races who were to possess it.

We left America at the close of the Carboniferous epoch. A glance at the
geological map will show the reader that during the Permian, Triassic,
and Jurassic epochs little was added to the United States, though here
and there deposits belonging to each of them crop out. In the Cretaceous
epoch, however, large tracts of land were accumulated, chiefly in the
South and West; and during the Tertiaries the continent was very nearly
completed, leaving only a narrow gulf running up to the neighborhood of
St. Louis to be fille