AMERICA THE OLD WORLD

(FROM GEOLOGICAL SKETCHES.)

BY L. AGASSIZ.


[Illustration]

First-born among the Continents, though so much later in culture and
civilization than some of more recent birth, America, so far as her
physical history is concerned, has been falsely denominated the _New
World_. Hers was the first dry land lifted out of the waters, hers the
first shore washed by the ocean that enveloped all the earth beside;
and while Europe was represented only by islands rising here and there
above the sea, America already stretched an unbroken line of land from
Nova Scotia to the Far West.

In the present state of our knowledge, our conclusions respecting the
beginning of the earth's history, the way in which it took form and
shape as a distinct, separate planet, must, of course, be very vague
and hypothetical. Yet the progress of science is so rapidly
reconstructing the past that we may hope to solve even this problem;
and to one who looks upon man's appearance upon the earth as the
crowning work in a succession of creative acts, all of which have had
relation to his coming in the end, it will not seem strange that he
should at last be allowed to understand a history which was but the
introduction to his own existence. It is my belief that not only the