Mississippi River Valley Black Hawk War, 1832 Frontier and pioneer life Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: CHAPTER XII. MONUMENTAL REMAINS OF THE PAST, IN THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY. Innumerable observers, in penetrating the bosom of the earth, in all the recorded periods of time, have come upon the remains of organized animal and vegetable bodies, the ruins of a gone-by world, the monuments of generations of ratioaals, whose history, whose annals, whose recorded traces, are as completely extinct as though they had not been. These monuments present materials for meditation of the profoundcsl interest, and the most inextricable perplexity. The monuments of present tropical existences, are found deep under the soil of the temperate and polar regions, -- impressions. petrifactions of the date, fern, bread-fruit tree, bamboo, lion, tiger, hippopotomus, -- under the snows and' frosts of the bitterest winters. It is but recently, that some French writers, as St. Pierre and Buffon, began to class these remains. Baron Cuvier, the historian of the animals of a past world, entered in the industry of great talent and profound research into this walk, and from noting the conformation of organic remains, has been enabled to classify the generations of the past, and to write the history of the changes which our world has probably undergone. Dr. Buckland ha...