hands execute all the behests of your convenience." Had chance formed the beds of coal under such a concurrence of auspicious and beneficent conditions, chance would not have brought it to our doors; chance would not have rescued it from burial beneath the sediments of a thousand following ages; chance would not have laid by in the same beds the ores of iron which the coal is fitted to reduce; chance would not have stored in the same relation the beds of limestone, to be used as a flux in the reduction of the iron ores by means of the mineral coal. See what provident Nature has done with other metals! Was it accident that enriched the upper peninsula of Michigan with her wealth of native copper? Or has there been in existence upon our earth any other being than man to whom these riches possessed the least utility or interest? The ores of copper lie buried a mile beneath the sandstones of the "Pictured Rocks." The sediments of unknown cycles of years were gathered upon the beds of valuable ores. At length, while the world was preparing for man, a fiery outburst threw the deep-buried treasures to the surface. It did more. It reduced their refractory ores for the hand of man, and enabled him to gather directly the native metal. Still more. The same fiery outburst bent the flinty rocks into the form of a huge trough, and Heaven sent down water to fill it and float the steam-sped vessel to the copper-bearing shore. And lastly, lest the manhood of our race should be spent before the discovery of the treasure, all-provident Nature broke up samples of cupriferous rock, and strewed them along the shore, and along the rivercourses, so that, when man should find them, he might trace the trail, as by a clew, to the original store-house of the native metal. And all these preparations, and provisions, and utilities have no relations to any other terrestrial denizen than man.

Nature has mined for us in gold. Deep in the rocky recesses of the earth lay the precious metal. It must be brought to the light of day. But Nature does not do this till the work of sowing sediments-the seeds of rocky growth has been completed over all the areas destined to be inhabited by man. Had the deep-treasured gold been brought up in the Mesozoic Ages, the inundations and vicissitudes of later times would have scattered it over the breadth of the land and the sea before our race had made its advent. No such false step was taken. It is only after the Tertiary beds have been all deposited that Nature throws up innumerable veins of quartz, which bring along with them the glittering gold. This is well; but Nature possessed a quartz-crushing machine in the shape of a glacier a mile in thickness, and some hundreds, if not thousands of miles in horizontal extent, and this she drew over the projecting veins of auriferous quartz and ground them to powder. These, at least, are the general views put forward by Sir Roderick Murchison in regard to the principal gold regions of the world. The California geologists, however, aver that the great ice-plow never scored the ribs of the Sierra Nevadas. Nature may have pulverized the goldquartz of our Western states and territories by some other agency. Nevertheless, it has been crushed and comminuted on a stupendous scale. When this work was done, by whatever means, she brought her gold-washing machine into requisition, and "jigged" the golden sands till the yellow particles were well assorted, and then strewed them along the narrow ravines to await the attentions of the coming man.

But we need not go to the golden sands of the Sacramento to read the anticipations of man in the arrangements of Nature. What is every well and spring but a subterranean stream that has been beguiled to light by the out

cropping of the impervious floor over which it had flowed? We need not attempt to imagine what would have resulted were the rocks left to rest in horizontal and continuous layers, but it is worth while to recognize the beneficence of that vast accumulation of loose materials which we call drift. It is, as it were, an enormous sponge, which drinks in the showers of heaven, and stores them away beyond the reach of defilement and putrefaction in the deep, cool reservoirs of the filtering sand-beds, so that it is almost impossible to penetrate the drift to a depth sufficient to secure an agreeable coolness without obtaining a plentiful supply of well-strained water. So common and so vital a comfort has been secured by the geologically-extraordinary deposition of such masses of loose materials over the surfaces of the naked rocks, and not less by their distribution in beds of sand and clay presenting every possible irregularity of thickness, extent, and disposition. (See Fig. 84.)

These and multitudes of other arrangements, collocations, structures, and products of a useful and beneficent character, are so many indications that during the long process of the world's fitting up—while yet the human era was contemplated as we contemplate the millennium—man, the nature of man, and the wants of man, constituted at least one of the objective points of cycles of geological preparation.

Finally, it is eminently worthy of remark that Nature has not only anticipated the coming of man, but has contemplated the exercise of human intelligence. How few of the benefits which Nature affords have been reached without study and thought! None will affirm that matter was endowed with all its capabilities of benefit to the human race without any design that those benefits should be secured and enjoyed. This is tantamount to saying that the provisions of Nature prophesy a reasoning mind. We

may venture to go much farther than this, and assert that the material of thought which Nature furnishes is correlated to the thinking principle in man. When the Creator adopted an intelligent method in the ordinations of the material world, it was equivalent to a declaration of purpose to introduce an intelligent being. And when the Creator had stocked the world with the materials of thought, and had planted in it a being capable of understanding Nature, it was the obvious purpose of the Deity that Nature should be investigated, and that, by such investigations, man should become not only wiser, but more reverent, religious, and happy.

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CHAPTER XXXI.

THE TOOTH OF TIME.

FEW words about the disintegration of the rocks. As the vital force employs itself in the demolition of the organic structures and the simultaneous repair of all the wastages, so the gigantic energies of geology have busied themselves in one age or place in demolishing the rocky fabrics consolidated with incredible labor in another age or place. The grain of sand upon the rivulet's border may have been incorporated successively into a dozen different formations, each in turn disintegrated to be inwrought in the rocky sheets of the next succeeding age.

Has the reader ever inquired whence came the materials for twenty-five miles of sedimentary strata? It is a question which geology is compelled to answer. The first and lowest great system of strata-the Laurentian-is in Canada thirty or forty thousand feet thick. This system is supposed to embrace nearly the entire globe, passing beneath the Paleozoic, Mesozoic, and Cenozoic strata, and extending, probably with greatly diminished thickness, under the beds of the existing oceans. It must have been accumulated while yet the primeval sea was wellnigh universal. This is the prevalent opinion. It is perfectly plain, however, that these vast beds of sediment must have had an origin in pre-existing rocks lying within reach of the denuding agencies of the time. How enormous a bulk of solid rocks was ground to powder to furnish material for these Laurentian strata may be imagined when the reader is reminded that the mean elevation of North America is