Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1902 edition. Excerpt: ... The other continents are convex, with an interior dome or range, from whose declivities the waters descend to the circumference; but North America is concave, having mountain systems parallel with its eastern and western coasts, whose principal streams fall into the Atlantic and the Pacific. Between the Appalachian and the Cordilleran regions a vast central valley, more than two thousand miles wide from rim to rim, extends with uniform contour from the tropics to the pole. The crest of this colossal cavity nearly coincides with the boundary between the Dominion and the United States, its northern part drained by the Mackenzie and Red rivers into the Arctic Ocean, and its southern, by the Mississippi and its six hundred tributaries, into the Gulf of Mexico. In a remote geological age this continental trough was the bed of an inland sea, whose billows broke upon the Alleghanies and the Rocky Mountains--archipelagoes with precipitous islands rising abruptly from the desolate main. The subsiding ocean left enormous saline deposits, which, at varying depths, underlie much of its surface, and which later were succeeded by tropical forests and jungles, nurtured by heat and moisture, their carbon stratified in the coal measures of the interior, and beneath whose impervious shadows, after many centuries, wandered herds of gigantic monsters, their fossil remains yet found in the loess of the Solomon and the Smoky Hill. In a subsequent epoch, as the land became cooler by radiation and firmer by drainage, the saurians were succeeded by ruminants, like the buffalo and the antelope, which pastured in myriads upon the succulent herbage, and followed the seasons in their endless migrations. Mysterious colonizations of strange races of men--the Aztecs, ..
