germinated as the earliest of plants in the steaming
oceans. The water warred against the land, tearing and
breaking at its rock formation and distributing it in
new strata, each buried beneath the next and holding fast
within it the fossilized remains that form the record of
its history. Huge fern plants spread their giant fronds
in the dank sunless atmospheres, to be buried later in
vast beds of decaying vegetation that form the coal-fields
of to-day.

Animal life began first, like the plants, in the bosom
of the ocean. From the slimy depths of the water life
crawled hideous to the land. Great reptiles dragged their
sluggish length through the tangled vegetation of the
jungle of giant ferns.

Through countless thousands of years, perhaps, this
gradual process went on. Nature, shifting its huge scenery,
depressed the ocean beds and piled up the dry land of
the continents. In place of the vast 'Continental Sea,'
which once filled the interior of North America, there
arose the great plateau or elevated plain that now runs
from the Mackenzie basin to the Gulf of Mexico. Instead
of the rushing waters of the inland sea, these waters
have narrowed into great rivers--the Mackenzie, the
Saskatchewan, the Mississippi--that swept the face of
the plateau and wore down the surface of the rock and
mountain slopes to spread their powdered fragments on
the broad level soil of the prairies of the west. With
each stage in the evolution of the land the forms of life