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He found but little of it in the men of his time: practically none in the contemporary poets of New England. It was probably something of this pristine quality that arrested Emerson's attention in Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass." He saw in it "the Appalachian enlargement of outline and treatment for service to American literature."

Here, north of the Catskills, the Appalachian barrier subsides and gives New York a supreme advantage over all the other Atlantic States a level route to the Great Lakes and the West. The Mohawk River threads the smiling landscape; beyond lies the "Finger Lake country" and the valley of the Genesee. Through this romantic region ran the Mohawk Trail, sending offshoots to Lake Champlain and the St.

Each year the people of these regions are richer by perhaps a billion dollars because the ice scraped its way down from Laurentia and spread out over the borders of the great plains on the west and of the Appalachian region on the east. We have considered the Laurentian highland and the glaciation which centered there.

We have it in our power to furnish ourselves with such a national appellation, from one of the grand and eternal features of our country; from that noble chain of mountains which formed its back-bone, and ran through the "old confederacy," when it first declared our national independence. I allude to the Appalachian or Alleghany mountains.

James Hall, Palaeontologist of New York, to the fact that these Palaeozoic rocks of the Appalachian chain, which are of such enormous density, where they are almost entirely of mechanical origin, thin out gradually as they are traced to the westward, where evidently the contemporaneous seas allowed organic rocks to be formed by corals, echinoderms, and encrinites in clearer water, and where, although the same successive periods are represented, the total mass of strata from the Silurian to the Carboniferous, instead of being 40,000 is only 4000 feet thick.

"The Appalachian mountains in their long majestic course from northeast to southwest rise to their greatest height in the New England states, culminating in Mount Washington, sixty-two hundred and ninety feet elevation, surrounded on all sides by lesser peaks, mostly from two thousand to five thousand feet high.

In his Journal, writing in the quaint, old-fashioned way, he said: "Our country has now been inhabited more than 130 years by the English, and still we hardly know anything of the Appalachian Mountains, that are nowhere above 250 miles from the sea.

THE PIEDMONT BELT. As an example of an ancient peneplain uplifted and dissected we may cite the Piedmont Belt, a broad upland lying between the Appalachian Mountains and the Atlantic coastal plain. The surface of the Piedmont is gently rolling.

It is probable that second place among the peaks of Appalachia may belong either to Clingman Dome or Guyot or LeConte, of the Smokies, or to Balsam Cone of the Black Mountains. In any case, the Great Smoky mountains are the master chain of the Appalachian system, the greatest mass of highland east of the Rockies.

In the west and south-west the province was extended to the Ohio and the Mississippi, and in fact embraced all the lands beyond the Alleghanies coveted and claimed by the old English colonies, now hemmed in between the Atlantic and the Appalachian range.