ants that lived and died in its waters or along its
banks, when every lake and pond deposited at its bottom in successive
layers the lighter or heavier materials floating in its waters and
settling gradually beneath them, the process by which stratified
materials are collected and gradually harden into rock is more easily
understood. But when the solid surface of the earth was only just
beginning to form, it would seem that the floating matter in the sea
can hardly have been in sufficient quantity to form any extensive
deposits. No doubt there was some abrasion even of that first crust;
but the more abundant source of the earliest stratification is to be
found in the submarine volcanoes that poured their liquid streams into
the first ocean. At what rate these materials would be distributed and
precipitated in regular strata it is impossible to determine; but that
volcanic materials were so deposited in layers is evident from the
relative position of the earliest rocks. I have already spoken of the
innumerable chimneys perforating the Azoic beds, narrow outlets of
Plutonic rock, protruding through the earliest strata. Not only are
such funnels filled with the crystalline mass of granite that flowed
through them in a liquid state, but it has often poured over their
sides, mingling with the stratified beds around. In the present state
of our knowledge, we can explain such appearances only by supposing
that the heated materials within the earth's crust poured out
frequently, meeting little resistance,--that they then scattered and
were precipitated in the ocean around, settling in successive strata
at its bottom,--that through such strata the heated masses within
continued to pour again and again, forming for themselves the
chimney-like outlets above mentioned.

Such, then, was the earliest American land,--a long, narrow island,
almost continental in its proportions, since it stretched from the
eastern borders of Canada nearly to the point where now the base of
the Rocky Mountains meets the plain of the Mississippi Valley. We may
still walk along its ridge and know that we tread upon the ancient
granite that first divided the waters into a northern and southern
ocean; and if our imaginations will carry us so far, we may look down
toward its base and fancy how the sea washed against this earliest
shore of a lifeless world. This is no romance, but the bald, simple
truth; for the fact that this granite band was lifted out of t