Making mountains

It has been a quiet 20 million years for the pebble: an interlude, at somewhere around 3–4 kilometres under the sea floor. The rock has still been crystallizing, but only very slowly. The water has by now mostly been squeezed out, so little fluid has flowed through that rock. At this depth it is hot, well above 1008°C. The pebble-form is sterile, lifeless. The time is now a little under 400 million years ago. We are in the Devonian Period. Above, at the Earth’s surface, changes have been taking place, but as far as they affected the pebble they could be on another planet. In the sea, the graptolites have been going through an evolutionary rollercoaster, with explosions of diversity separated by bad times, when they only just survive. Soon, one of those bad times will be terminal, and they will disappear from the open seas, never to return. By contrast, the fish are beginning to thrive both in the sea and in rivers and lakes. The land is greening, almost explosively, as plants evolve furiously. None of this affects the future pebble. But something soon will. The sea above has been gradually shallowing, filled in with sediment from the encroaching land. Eventually, it changed, some few million years ago, into a vast coastal plain, traversed by rivers. We are about at the time, now, when that lowland is about to rear up to form a range of mountains that—although much reduced from their early glory—can still be climbed today. What took them so long? For the Iapetus Ocean to the north, which, 50 million years ago, was more than 1000 kilometres across, had effectively disappeared 20 million years ago, the ocean plate sliding beneath the northern continent of Scotland and north America. But on Avalonia, the effect was as if these continents had just slid neatly into place, with only minor distortion of the Avalonian crust (and, in truth, these landmasses did approach each other partly from the side, rather than headon). Did the mountain-building force still come from the north, perhaps as some mysteriously delayed intensification of the vice-like grip that held these landmasses together?

Archaeological Needs for Florida

Consistent and concentrated efforts for archaeological research within the region of Florida have long been a needed factor in the development of North America's pre-history.Here lies one of the key spots for cultural contact between the northern continent and the chain of islands that extends southward. The geographical significance of such a location can not be too highly emphasized. What work has been undertaken in the state unfortunately has not been followed by careful laboratory consideration and, as a result, prehistory in this area has suffered from mere spontaneous spurts of effort.

The Birth of an American State: Georgia: An Effort of Philanthropy and Protestant Propaganda

Students of the history of the communities now established in a great Republic and a great Dominion on the northern continent of America have this advantage: that they can begin at the beginning of things, at a definite point or from a line drawn, so to say, in the open plain in the light of the full day. There is for them no search for the head-springs of the river in almost impenetrable fastnesses, no dim twilight before the dawn, no doubtful region of myth or tradition or biassed chronicle. A plain tale of truth and fact is there for their perusal from the first. And I suppose in the case of no one of the States which has a beginning before the Declaration of Independence is this more conspicuous than in the case of the last of them formed from overseas, Georgia, the subject of the present essay. The authentic materials are ready to hand in the Public Record Office in abundance: in State papers, in entry books of letters, in books of appointments and grants to settlers, in journals of trustees, in minutes of the Common Council, in proceedings of the president and assistants for the town and county of Savannah from 1741 onwards, and in a mass of original correspondence, memorials and the like.

III.—Restoration of the Antillean Continent

There have been many suggestions respecting a continental connection of the West Indies, but this is the first attempt made to restore the Antillean lands. It is based upon the slowly accumulating evidence of great systems of submerged valleys, or fjords extending from the commonly buried lower reaches of all the great rivers, upon the terrestrial deformation involved in the changes of level over large regions and upon the distribution of the characteristic forms of life. The present investigations confirm and amplify the history of the coastal plain of the northern continent.