Page:The Government of Iowa 1911.djvu/21

Rh have been written deep across the whole face of this fair Commonwealth, must answer. Professor Calvin says that "these geologic records, untampered with, and unimpeachable, declare that for uncounted years Iowa, together with the great valley of the Mississippi, lay beneath the level of the sea. So far as it was inhabited at all, marine forms of animals and plants were its only occupants." Countless ages passed; the waters disappeared; plant and animal life came to abound only to be ground down and destroyed later by the great sheets of ice and snow which flowed down from the north. Devastating as they were, the glaciers made Iowa what it is to-day. The Soil. — "Soils of uniform excellence would have been impossible," says Professor Calvin, "in a non-glacial Iowa. The soils of Iowa have a value equal to all of the silver and gold mines of the world combined. And for this rich heritage of soils we are indebted to great rivers of ice that overflowed Iowa from the north and northwest. The glaciers in their long journey ground up the rocks over which they moved and mingled the fresh rock flour from granites of British America and northern Minnesota with pulverized limestones and shales of more southern regions, and used these rich materials in covering up the bald rocks and leveling the irregular surface of preglacial Iowa." Thus in the course of the ages Iowa was made habitable for plant, animal, and man through the operation of natural laws.

The Resources of Iowa. — The census of Iowa for the year 1905 gives the number of farms in the State as 209,163,