Page:Centennial History of Oregon 1811-1912, Volume 1.djvu/252



is only the top of another faulted block which slopes gradnally upward toward the east.

If a small displacement along old fault lines could cause such a disastrous earthquake as recently visited California, what a terrible shaking Oregon must have experienced when five or six thousand feet of Eocene and Miocene strata sediment and columnar basalt were fractured, dislocated and heaved upward into a great lonely-looking mountain. But it seems most probable that this was accomplished by many successive faultings along the same line of fracture, rather than by one mighty upthrow. But Stein mountain is not the onlj' block mountain in this region. Russell tells us that most of the lakes of Lake County lie at the base of the precipitous face of a faulted mountain. Summer and Abert lakes, as well as the dried up Alkali lake, (now owned and worked for soda by the American Soda Products Co.) are good samples of these huge faults.

America has been designated as the Cradle of the Camels by Professor William B. Scott, of Princeton University.

"Camels have been found in almost every part of the world," he says, "but I believe they originated on this continent and passed into the Old World at one of the times when this and other continents were joined by the filling up of Bering Straits."

This theory of the filling up of Bering Straits has been used by the profes- sor also in explaining the similarity of structure in animals which would seem to have been at one time or other indigenous both to the far north and the far south. Bears at one time were supposed to have originated here, but scien- tists say now they lived first in the old countries and migrated here in one of the distant ages when the straits were closed and made a natural passageway into the country. The disappearance of the great prehistoric creatures which once roamed the earth the professor attributes to the introduction of new dis- eases rather than to an exhaustion or devolution of type.

Probably the most interesting part of the work of geologists and paleontolo- gists is the tracing out the similarity between the animals that lived on the earth millions of years ago and the animals on the earth now. The ancient horse looked more like a goat than the horse now in use. Some of them had three toes, and some four, with a long head and round ears. The ancient camel was a sort of a cross between the camel and giraffe that now exists. All these differences aiid peculiarities have to be studied out from the remains of the ani- mals found in the rocks. Many of the animals of ancient geologic times were far larger than anything on the globe now. There were Mastodons here in Oregon, fifteen feet in height, with tusks three times as long as the present day elephant. There were huge unwieldy lizard like beasts called Dinosaurs, thirty feet in length, and sabre toothed panthers or tigers, the most savage beast the earth ever produced. The numbers, variety and size of land animals, sea ser- pents, lizards and bird-life of ancient times far exceeded anything known to the age of man.

THE AGE OP MAN

In the order of their creation, or evolution, or how they got on the Earth, the reptiles and fishes came first; then the land animals, and birds; and finally