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"The natural lakes and the peat-holes the latter from twelve to twenty feet deep formed extensive water-basins. Some of you will remember the turf diggings in the great bog in Ireland, as we passed through it on our way to Killarney. The peat was not dug out in trenches, but the entire surface of the land was skimmed off, just as workmen in the city dig away a hill.
In the Mississippi, however, the case is otherwise and very striking, inasmuch as we find here, at separate latitudes, distinct species of the same genera, somewhat like the differences observed in distinct water-basins; and yet the river is ever flowing on past these animals, which remain, as it were, spell-bound to the regions most genial to them.
Had we only the evidence of the deposits of rock heaped above each other in regular strata by the slow accumulation of materials, they alone would convince us of the long and slow maturing of God's work on the earth but when we add to these the successive populations of whose life this world has been the theatre, and whose remains are hidden in the rocks into which the mud or sand or soil of whatever kind on which they lived has hardened in the course of time, or the enormous chains of mountains whose upheaval divided these periods of quiet accumulation by great convulsions, or the changes of a different nature in the configuration of our globe, as the sinking of lands beneath the ocean, or the gradual rising of continents and islands above it, or the wearing of great river-beds, or the filling of extensive water-basins, till marshes first and then dry land succeeded to inland seas, or the slow growth of coral reefs, those wonderful sea-walls raised by the little ocean-architects whose own bodies furnish both the building-stones and the cement that binds them together, and who have worked so busily during the long centuries, that there are extensive countries, mountain-chains, islands, and long lines of coast consisting solely of their remains, or the countless forests that must have grown up, flourished, died, and decayed, to fill the storehouses of coal that feed the fires of the human race to-day, if we consider all these records of the past, the intellect fails to grasp a chronology for which our experience furnishes no data, and the time that lies behind us seems as much an eternity to our conception as the future that stretches indefinitely before us.
Ere I lost sight of the east-side mountains, those on the west came in sight, so that holding my course was easy, and, though making haste, I halted for a moment to gaze down into the beautiful pure blue crevasses and to drink at the lovely blue wells, the most beautiful of all Nature's water-basins, or at the rills and streams outspread over the ice-land prairie, never ceasing to admire their lovely color and music as they glided and swirled in their blue crystal channels and potholes, and the rumbling of the moulins, or mills, where streams poured into blue-walled pits of unknown depth, some of them as regularly circular as if bored with augers.
Henceforth you shall wear stockings of sooty black instead of the shining silver ones of which you are so proud. You who were too fine to dig in the earth shall ever be pecking at dusty wood. And as you declined to help in building the water-basins of the world, so you shall never sip from them when you are thirsty.
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