Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: III. TUB FERN FORESTS OF THE CARBON IFEROUS PERIOD. DRAW two lines on your map, the upper ona running from the mouth of the St. Lawrence westward nearly to St. Paul on the Mississippi, and the lower one from the neighborhood of St. John's in Newfoundland, running southwesterly about to the point where the Wisconsin joins the Mississippi, but jutting down to form an extensive peninsula comprising part of the States of Indiana and Illinois, and you include between them all of the United States which existed at the close of the Devonian period. The uppei line rests against the granite hills dividing tha Silurian and Devonian deposits of the British Possessions to the north from those of the United States to the south, Canada itself consisting, in great part, of the granite ridge. How far the early deposits extended to the north of the Laurentian Hills, as well as the out line of that portion of the continent in those times, remains still very problematical; but theinvestigations thus far undertaken in those re- gkms would lead to the supposition that the same granite upheaval which raised Canada stretched northward in a broad, low ridge of land, widening in its upper part and extending to the neighborhood of Bathurst Inlet and King William's Island, while on either side of it, to the east and west, the Silurian and Devonian deposits extended far toward the present outlines of the continent. These fundamental relations of the continents are admirably presented by Professor Guyot in his charming volume entitled, " Earth and Man." Indeed, our geological surveys, as well as the information otherwise obtained concerning the primitive condition of North America and the gradual accessions it has received in more recent periods, point to a very early circumscription of the area w...