hand, the cheaty layer of this Ohio rock, does not seem to belong to any part of the silurian; and the orthocrea of the mountain limestone, and those of the upper limerock of this state seem to be identical.

mation, corresponds better with the Helderberg limerock of Mr. Conrad, than with the Trenton. But the Helderberg is above the Salmon river sandstone, which he says is well developed in Ohio, and must therefore correspond to our fine-grained Having departed from our intention of sandstone, and this is with us above the giving a brief statement of the New-York lime-rock. By considering the Helderberg report, but few words can be added, Mr. limestone of New-York, as the upper mem- Mather, in his report upon the first or Hudber, and the Trenton as the lower member, son river district, gives the following list of of the Ohio lime-rock a striking similarity the rocks of New-York, Westchester, and of fossils is observed. As yet the cyatho- Putnam counties: granite, gneiss, micaphylla has not to our knowledge been seen slate, quartz-rock, Talcase-slate, limestone, in our blue limestone as low as Cincinnati, sienite, serpentine, steatite, angite-rock, which is about 1,000 feet down in the lime- queenstone. The bricks manufactured in rock, nor has the statilus of the lower mem- those counties, are estimated at forty-two ber, been discovered in the upper strata. millions nine hundred thousand, at five The entire thickness of the limestone, is dollars fifty cents per thousand. He exno where seen in Ohio, and therefore we amined many of the old shafts sunk along know little or nothing of the rocks beneath. the banks of the Hudson in early times, in The fossils correspond closely with those search of silver, without finding any traces of the "wenlock limestones and shales" of of that metal, These are the works of that the silurian system, embracing at the same age when it was supposed America was time many of those assigned to the " Ilan- filled with gold, silver, and precious stones. deilo flags," the "Caradoc beds" and the There is, also, a report upon Rockland and "Ludlow rocks," comprising the entire silu- Orange counties, in the latter of which, Mr. rian. At the same time it has the "cheaty" W. Horton was engaged as assistant, and stratum of the mountain limestone. If we makes a separate report. The iron ores of strike out all between the bottom of the the river counties appear to be exhaustless, lower silurian, and the second member but not very easily worked. The report of the medial, as given for New-York, dispels all the visions of copper, silver, bringing number two and seven of Mr. Con- and gold, that have so long occupied the rad's section together, as the reliquæ would minds of the inhabitants of that region. indicate, we must look for the equivalent of Professor E. Emmans reports upon the rich our fine-grained sandstone, either in his Hel- mineral district of the northeast. Mr. derberg and Brochiopadreus sandstone, or Vamoxena of the central, and James Hall, in the upper olive sandstone, and the moun- Esquire, of the western or fourth geologitain limestone will be wanting. By such a cal division of the state. Instruction and disposal of strata, the conglomerate is the amusement can be drawn largely from all first rock of the carboniferous group of Ohio. of the reports here noticed; but a great In the second report of the geology of Ohio, space would be necessary to transfer even page 106, Mr. Foster unhesitatingly gives the leading matter to our columns. the name of mountain limestone to the rock underlying our shale. There are according to Dr. Locke, Professor Riddell and Professor Briggs, two distinct members of this rock, the blue, or lower, and the buff, each of which may be subdivided into strata. Dr. Locke and Professor Briggs, do not, as we have seen, commit themselves upon the geological position of this deposit. It is an important question, which we hope will ere long be fully investigated. If it is mountain limestone, where is the underlying old red sandstone, and the whole silurian system? where shall we refer the fine-grained sandstone, and slate formation? On the other

THE FALLEN TREE.

JARED, the son of Jesse, was reflecting upon the vicissitudes of human life and the versatility of human actions; he was ruminating on the changes in the tastes of men, and the transitory nature of all sublunary enjoyments. He had collected the different periods of life together, and again distributed them into those natural divisions which take place in the seasons of the year. As he walked forth from his tent, he beheld an oak, that had braved the tempests of an hundred winters, standing erect, in the ma

jesty and grandeur of its strength, spreading abode. Again he engaged in the cares of its mighty arms, as if to grasp the heavens, life. He plowed his fields and scattered and would have deemed it immortal-had he seed upon the ground. As he threw his not stood upon a little knoll of earth, which scythe into the grass he could scarce help had been thrown up by the falling of a tree: lamenting the destruction of the verdant he began to soliloquize. beauties, occasioned by the sweep of his "This oak is not immortal, for behold, hand. The meadow with all its array of here is where its fellow once stood. Its virent grass and multifarious flowers, was mighty trunk was many years ago precipi- in a few days so seared with the sun, and tated from the summit of this little eminence, winnowed with the breeze, that he was with the resounding crash of the earthquake. again inspired with the deepest despair, and It laid here for half a century together, grad- the most profound melancholy. Again he ually decomposing from the alternations of retired to his home. In a few weeks, he wind and of rain, of sunshine and of shade, returned to the meadow where he had lateuntil it has finally disappeared, saving this ly been so despondent. Fresh verdure had brown and lengthened mark, which it has covered its surface; a new tribe of flowers left upon the surface of the ground. It is had sprung from the roots of the stalks he true, it once was erect as its mighty neigh-had extirpated. The stream that wound bor. Its shade was as refreshing and its through the meadow, covered when he left leaves as green. The birds chirped as mer-it with green slime, and almost exhausted rily and sung as melodiously in its branches, from long-continued drought, was now reand the squirrel leaped as often and as ac-plenished and purified from recent rains, tively upon it, from limb to limb, and from and glided peacefully along, glittering in the spray to spray. But it has now left nothing sun, and the lark was twittering around it but this sad relic of itself behind it; its in the meadow. strength and its umbrage, its verdure and its Day succeeded day, night followed night, beauty are fled, never to return. But what and year rolled on after year, in their usual shall be said of man, possessing almost succession. One beautiful midsummer day, the talents of an angel?' Shall he decay Jared strolled into the woods, where full like the oak, and wither like the tender twenty years before he had taken his solibark? Shall he moulder like the massive tary walk. He came to the place where trunk, and disappear as its mighty branches? Shall all the troubles of his breast pass unregarded by his Maker, and shall all his hopes shrivel as the leaf and disappear as the shade? Shall the early joys of life pass away as the sweet spring music of the birds, and shall naught be heard in the evening of his days, but the sighing of the winds and the cooing of the dove? Yes, said he, this is the fate of man. Poor man, is worse off than the insensate tree, for he has a love of life and a hope of a futurity, and yet he has not the firmness of the oak, to resist the hurricane of life or sustain those 'storms of sorrow,' that fall ponderously upon him, but is agitated with every gale and bends with every breeze. In youth he has a nature that prompts him to expect more from huIman life than it is calculated to afford, till stung with disappointment and discouraged from defeat, he at length overlooks the few little delights that belong to life, and sinks into the vale of sorrow and the gloom of desperation."

He turned himself from this scene of decay and walked sad and solitary to his gloomy

he had seen the mark of the fallen tree. To his surprise a beautiful young tree stood in all the vigor of maturity, where the old one had decayed. The birds sung sweetly in its boughs, and it spread a wide and refreshing shade over his head. The breezes at the point where the sunshine and the shade united, were exhilarating to his spirits, and his long and dreary spell of melancholy was dispersed, as the clouds pass away after a long continued rain. He called to mind the thoughts that had engrossed his attention, when many years before he had stood upon that spot. He now ruminated on the prospect of the resurrection of the body, and the immortality of the soul, as illustrated by the returning bloom of the meadow, and the reappearance of the tree.

"Awhile we flourish," said he, "like the cedars of Lebanon. We spring up to maturity as the tall pine of the mountain. Our course is upward like that of the bird of heaven, and we seem to dwell among the stars. But the tempest comes. Limb after limb, is dashed from the tree, as the 'curls of beauty' fall from the head of man, until,

And such as love-sick rhymesters choose, "their eyes I've gazed upon fair eyes till mine grew dim,

As yet, that love" in words that breathe and burn." To theirs-the deep BETROTHAL OF THE HEART! But stood he now resolved, that this fair night

SELECT MISCELLANY.

EARLY FRENCH SETTLEMENTS IN in the main to be true: especially is this

THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY.

FROM the interesting volumes of Mr. EDWARD FLAGG, of Louisville, entitled "The Far West, or a Tour Beyond the Mountains," we are enabled to follow up Mr. PERKINS's excellent paper on early French discovery in the Mississippi Valley, with some account of the forts and villages founded by the Chevalier La Salle and his companions, and settled and permanently occupied by their successors. The extent and localities of the cordon of French posts, intended to reach from the St. Lawrence to the Gulf of Mexico, are well known. Those points which, under the immediate successors of La Salle and his fellow-explorers, assumed somewhat the character of villages, were some twelve or fifteen in number, situated principally on the Mississippi, Illinois, and Wabash rivers. The most prominent of them were Kaskaskia, Fort Chartres, Cahokia, Prairie du Rocher, St. Charles, and St. Vincents; and of the past history and present condition of all these, but the last two, some very interesting particulars are given in the following gleanings from Mr. FLAGG'S volumes.-HESPERIAN.

KASKASKIA.

the case with regard to that region which
lies west of the Alleghany range. Little as
there may be in the elder sections of our
Atlantic states to demand veneration for the
past, no sooner does the traveler find him-
self gliding along the silvery wave of the
"beautiful river," than at the same moment

he finds himself forsaking all that the fairy
creations of genius have ever consecrated,
or the roll of the historian chronicled for
coming time. All is NEW. The very soil
on which he treads, fertile beyond compar-
ison, and festering beneath the undisturbed
vegetation of centuries; the rolling forests,
bright, luxuriant, gorgeous as on the dawn
of creation; the endless streams pouring
onward in their fresh magnificence to the
The inhabitants are
ocean, all seem new.
emigrants late from other lands, and every
operation of human skill on which the eye
may rest betrays a recent origin. There is
those mysterious monuments of a race
but a single exception to these remarks:
whom we know not of!

In consideration, therefore, of the circumstance that antiquities in this blessed land of ours are, indeed, very few and far between, I deem it the serious duty of every traveler, be he virtuoso or be he not, whenever once so happy as to lay his grasp upon an antique "in any form, in any shape,' In a country like our own, where every-just to hold fast to the best of his ability! thing is fresh and recent, and where nothing has yet been swept by the mellowing touch of departed time, any object which can lay but the most indifferent claim to antiquity fails not to be hailed with delighted attention. "You have," say they of the other hemisphere, "no ivy-mantled towers; no moss-grown, castellated ruins; no dungeon-keeps rearing in dark sublimity their massive walls and age-bleached battlements; nothing to span the mighty chasm of bygone years, and to lead down the fancy into the shadowy realms of the past; and, therefore, your country is steril in moral interest." Now, though this corrollary is undoubtedly false, I yet believe the proposition

Such, reader, be it known, was my own praiseworthy determination when drawing nigh to the eastern shore of the stream opposite to the ancient French village Kaskaskia. The sun was going down, and as I approached the sandy edge of the sea-green water, a gay bevy of young folks were whirling the long, narrow, skiff-like ferryboat like a bird across the stream, by means of a hawser to which it was attached, and which extended from shore to shore. In my own turn I stepped into the boat, and in a few moments the old French negro had forced it half across the river, at this spot about three or four hundred yards in width. For one who has ever visited Kaskaskia in

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the last beauitful days of summer, a pen like as regards age, the same to a year; but my own need hardly be employed to delin- while every object which, in the one, meets eate the loveliness of the scene which now the eye, looks fresh as if but yesterday opened upon the vew. For miles the gleamy touched by the last chiselling of the archisurface of the gentle Kaskaskia might be tect, in the latter the thoughts are carried seen retreating from the eye, till lost at back at least to Noah's ark! Two centulength in its windings through the forests ries have rolled by since the "city of the of its banks, resting their deep shadows on Pilgrims" ceased to be a "cornfield;" but the stream in all the calm magnificence of where will you now look for a solitary relic inanimate nature. The shore I was leaving of that olden time? "State-street," the swelled gracefully up from the water's edge, scene where American blood was first poured clothed in forests until it reached the bluffs, out by British soldiery; "Old Cornhill;" which towered abrupt and loftily; while the site of the "Liberty-tree;" and the here and there along the landscape the low wharf from which the tea was poured into roof of a log cabin could be caught peeping the dock, are indeed pointed out to you as forth from the dark shrubbery. The bank spots memorable in the history of the of the stream I was approaching presented Leaguer of Boston;" and yonder frowns an aspect entirely the reverse; less lovely, the proud hight of Bunker's Hill; there but more picturesque. A low sandy beach lay the British battle-ships, and there was stretched itself more than a mile along the burning Charlestown;" but, with almost river, destitute of trees, and rounding itself the solitary exception of the "Old South" gently away into a broad green plain. Upon Church, with the cannon-ball imbedded in this plain, a portion of the American Bot- its tower, where shall we look for an object tom, at the distance of a few hundred yards around which our associations may cluster? from the water, is situated all that now re- This is not the case with these old villages. mains of "old Kaskaskia." From the cen- A century has looked down upon the same ter rises a tall Gothic spire, hoary with objects, in the same situations and under time, surmounted by an iron cross; and the same relations, with a change scarcely around this nucleus are clustered irregular-appreciable. Yon aged church-tower has ly, at various intervals, the heavy-roofed, thrown its venerable shadow alike over the time-stained cottages of the French inhabit- Indian corn-dance, the rude cotillion of the ants. These houses are usually like those French villager, the Spanish fandango, the of the West Indian planters, but a single Virginia reel, and the Yankee frolic. Thus, story in height, and the surface which they then, when I speak of these places with occupy is, of course, in the larger class, reference to antiquity, I refer not so much proportionably increased. They are con- to the actual lapse of years as to the presstructed, some of rough limestone, some of ent aspect and age of the individual objects. timber, framed in every variety of position: In this view there are few spots in our counhorizontal, perpendicular, oblique, or all try which may lay more undisputed claim united; thus retaining their shape till they to antiquity than these early French settlerot to the ground, with the interstices stuff-ments in the Western Valley. ed with the fragments of stone, and the external surface stuccoed with mortar; others, a few only, are framed, boarded, etc., in modern style. Nearly all have galleries in front, some of them spacious, running around the whole building, and all have garden-plats enclosed by stone walls or stoccades. Some of these curious-looking structures are old, having bided the storm-winds of more than a century. It is this circumstance which throws over the place that antiquated, venerable aspect to which I have alluded, and which equally applies to all the other villages of this peculiar people I have yet spoken of. The city of Philadelphia and this neglected village of Kaskaskia are,

There is one feature of these little villages to which I have not at this time alluded, but which is equally amusing and characteristic, and which never fails to arrest the stranger's observation. I refer to the narrowness of those avenues intended for streets. It is no very strange thing that in aged Paris structure should be piled upon structure on either side even to the clouds, while hardly a footpath exists between; but that in this vast Western world a custom, in all respects the same, should have prevailed, surpasseth understanding. This must have resulted not surely from the lack of elbow-room, but from the marvellous sociability of the race, or from that attachment to the customs of their