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: CHAPTER III. THE PLATEAU OF NORTH AMERICA. It ia now twenty-seven years, nearly a full generation, since I submitted to tho scrutiny of science and the public "A Hydrographic Map of North America," exhibiting in daguerreotype the cardinal physical architecture of our continent. Upon this is exactly defined the Mountain formation, inclosing the Plateau of the Table Lands. This subdivision of our country, amounting to one-third of the whole area, comes now in the bounding march of empire, to have a necessary, an intense, a pre-eminent interest to our people. Undoubtedly the scheme of Independence, inaugurated in 1776, sustained through the fortitude of the Revolution, and consummated in the Union of 1787, contemplated and commenced a Continental RepublicI In the ripening of time, we are now called upon to receive into this continental Union the independent and equal States of the Plateau, and to construct across it a complete system of continental railway. How it is that immense facts, dormant since creation, and noticed only to be unanimously rejected by human society, flash suddenly out of midnight obscurity, and by a single step plant themselves upon the very throne itself of public attention, may be thus illustrated: Columbus, intent upon discovering a direct route by sea to Orieuta1! Asia, died without any thought of the new continent, or knowledge that he had seen it. Amerigo Vespucci, a younger navigator, identified the new continent, established its existence in the popular mind, and gave to it his own name, America. Thus, in 1842, commenced to agitato itself throughout America, tho energetic geographical movement, to reorganize the column of central progress artificially stagnated in Missouri since 1820. Exploration, conquest, the conversion of the wildern...