Terres, which now make the slopes of the Rocky Mountains uninhabitable. The Mississippi and its tributaries would have ceased to exist, and the habitable portions of North America reduced two-thirds.

d. SOIL.

§ 68. "Man," say McCosh and Dickie, in their work on "Creation,"*"is but the unwitting copyist, on a small scale, of actions which have been conducted on a far greater scale, and apparently with his benefit in view. Those very qualities which a good soil ought to possess, have been induced, in course of time, by various chemical and physical agencies, which have been in continual operation. The debris of rocks yielding calcareous, silicious, aluminous, and other mineral ingredients, have been brought together, and mixed in a way which the husbandman imitates when necessity demands. The furrows drawn by our plowshares are but scratches on the surface of the soil compared with the changes to which that same soil has been subjected in former ages, and to which it owes its varied capabilities of supporting plants and yielding subsistence to the animal kingdom."

Now let us view, in this connection, the soil of our own Mississippi Valley. There, besides the agencies just mentioned, are these great rivers by which this plain is watered, and whose specific mission can be traced in the superb mould which they have been for ages engaged in forming.

* Page 346.

For, long before the white man, or that strange, parenthetical people which preceded him,-even before that

Disciplined and populous race,

which built the great mounds of the West,

While yet the Greek

Was hewing the Pentelicus to forms

Of symmetry, and rearing on its rock

The glittering Parthenon;

then were these rivers engaged in collecting, in depositing, in manuring the soil. Could a scoffer among the fallen angels, such as those who in these days argue the absence or indolence of God from the apparent wastes of creation, have watched these rivers as amid the pine forests and the lagoons of pre-Adamite life they wore their sluggish way through their marshy bed, until, as time passed on, and the fertilizing action of the water developed itself, rich and dark mosses began to cluster, and mammoth ferns to raise their thick and juicy spires, and the canebrake to thicken, so as to present an impenetrable barrier on the river bank; could he have seen how the waters of these rivers, and of the seas from which they subsided, were only broken by the clumsy dip of bird-mammoths when in pursuit of fish, or by the plunge of the water-horse, he might well have asked, as he compared his own high and refined order of intelligence with the low and inartificial type of creatures before him, what was the purpose of this apparent waste. If so, a view of the distant future would be the answer. Reefs, the workmanship of that coral population which, for hundreds of years, had been rearing in the waters their

come.

fretted mansions, would gradually receive a light though fertile soil. Then comes a rich and fat vegetation, producing and precipitating by its oils and salts the most effective of manures. Then, as the rivers narrow, and the bluffs arise, and as the agency of fire begins to be felt, the prairie-grass commences its work of covering this rich soil with a canvas to preserve it for the use of the nations to Oak-trees, from three to four hundred years old, have been found with this prairie sod so placed underneath their roots as to show that it was there when the acorn was dropped. For centuries, therefore, the long and strong threads of the grass-root have been knitted to and fro, until at last they have become a fabric, the tenacity of which no loom can rival. For centuries birds have rendered their aid to complete the work by dropping down seeds of an infinite variety of stunted but thick-set little plants that clinch and rasp the sod above and beneath. For centuries fires have periodically blazed over the whole surface, forcing vegetation, in very self-defence, to betake itself to underground work, where its enemy cannot reach it, packing itself away in cellars two or three stories deep.

§ 69. Now, let us observe the soil that by this process has been produced. On the bottom lands we have a soil of sand and clay, richly impregnated and saturated with carbon and with the vast quantities of decayed vegetable matter which the rivers are constantly precipitating. Corn, not unusually to the amount of an hundred and fifty bushels to the acre, is here produced, with scarcely any more preparation than the turning of the soil, which is already so soft and pliable as to require only the ordinary

plow-work. From this, which forms, more strictly speaking, the river-basin, there rises not unfrequently a second, or subsidiary bottom, at an average height of fifty feet from the river level, and sloping back to the bluff heights which form the base of the inland prairies. Of the fertility of this formation, as well as of that of the vast inland expanses that are covered by the prairie sod, it is not necessary here to speak. It is sufficient to say, that nations, exceeding in population all Europe and Asia, will find food in the great valley which Divine wisdom and beneficence has thus prepared.

e. FUEL.

§ 70. The traveler who passes up the Upper Missouri into regions where the crack of the woodman's ax is as yet but rarely heard, will recollect how the progress of civilization is marked by the frequency of the little wood-piles which are placed along the shore to meet the wants of the steamboat as she pushes her away against the strong and muddy current. 'There," is the cry, as the pile of fuel exhibits itself on the river-bank, "there is the mark of man; there exists, not far off, a human home, and here is the sign of thought and contrivance.” No one would listen contentedly to the suggestion that these little heaps were drift-wood, broken by some violent storm into these peculiar shapes, and then swept by chance to these particular spots in the heaps in which they are now found.

It is hard, however, to see how we can admit contrivance in the wood-piles by the river-side, and deny it to the wonderful deposits of fuel which we find adapted to the

growing wants of human society. As the forests are hewn down, and more particularly as the great and treeless prairies are peopled, we may well pause to admire that wise. mercy which provided an inexhaustible field of fuel at the very spot where it is the most required. And yet it is no slight proof of the patience and majesty of the procession of the Divine will, that it is only lately that man has been able to understand the object of this great contrivance. Those huge cone-bearing trees, those rich and varied mosses, that flowerless and fruitless vegetation, so luxuriant and so immense, for what were they meant? And then, those layers of black stone, cropping out by the hill-side, what object have they? But now the answer comes in the hum of "15,000 steam-engines, with a power equal to that of 2,000,000 of men, and thus is put into operation machinery equaling the unaided power of 300,000,000 or 400,000,000 of men."* The answer rises with the smoke of the cottage where labor plies its task, and from the whistle of both the magnificent steam-hotel that navigates the Mississippi, and the energetic and bustling little propeller that darts up into the narrowest of the inlets that feed the inhospitable shores of Lake Superior.

So it is, interpreting the meaning of the past by the development of the present. If, as we are entitled to do, we take the converse, and judge of the development of the future by the meaning of the present, how still more majestic becomes that Providence by which both present and future are determined! Thick beds of coal, we are told,

* Hitchcock's Rel. Truth Illustrated by Science, p. 111, etc.