Page:Atlantis Arisen.djvu/426

 are often an agreeable surprise, from the number of things they are able to teach the conventionally educated. But it is not uncommon to find among prospectors, surveyors, miners, and lumbermen, college-bred men, as well as specimens of the genus homo of every other variety. The rarest of all is to find one resembling the type invented for literary effect by writers of American fiction, and badly copied by our cousins over sea. If there is one in all this Northwest, he remains hidden from my observation.

history of the formation of the country north of the Columbia is given in about these words by Professor Condon:

"During the older geological period, when the Pacific Ocean covered all Washington west of the Blue, Bitter Root, and Coeur d'Alene Mountains, the Cascade Range, one hundred and fifty miles from the then ocean-beach, was being slowly lifted up from the bottom of the sea, until it formed a barrier excluding the ocean from East Washington, and changing the seashore to the west slope of the Cascades, where conditions favorable to coal-deposits existed, resulting in the laying down of a vast coal-field extending almost from the northern to the southern boundary of the State.

"After ages given to the draining and drying up of the inland sea and the deposition of rocks and soils east of the Cascades, the Coast Range was elevated in the same gradual manner, the ocean, however, not being excluded from the long north-andsouth depression between the two ranges. This is shown by the fresh-water sediment in the later rocks of the interior, while the sediments in the rocks west of the Cascades are marine. As in the former instance of upheaval, the conditions again favored the deposit of coal, but of an inferior quality, being lignites.

"The glacial period following the tertiary, grinding down the mountains and scooping out the valleys, gave the country its