After many millions of tons had been thus ground up
and tossed about and mingled with the waters of the seas, the earth, in a
fit of fiery anger, turned and baked them, with intense heat, out of all
semblance to their former appearance.
These baked masses, in the course of
time, were thrust up out of the seas, mashed and macerated once more, again
deposited as sand, silt, pebbles and boulders, and again burned. These
processes followed each other, how many times we do not know, the earth all
the while keeping up her steady uplift of the children of her bosom out of
the great sea. Higher and higher came the land. Further and further receded
the sea, until, in due course, the sun shone upon a vast area of land that
was the rude skeleton of what is now the continent of North America.
It would have taken a keen eye, however, to have imagined from that which
we see to-day what was there. The Gulf of California reached far up, even
into Nevada, and covered what are now the Mohave and Colorado Deserts;
there was no California Coast Range; the Gulf of Mexico was vastly larger
than it is to-day, covering all Florida, and reaching up the Mississippi
Valley half-way to the Great Lakes.
The First Strata. It was just preceding the last uplift of this epoch that
the era of deposition of rock debris was so prolonged that twelve thousand
feet of strata were washed into the bed of the sea, in the region now known
as the Grand Canyon Country.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 123 of 322
Words from 32500 to 32772
of 85893
