We will begin at the beginning, and add a chapter to the geology of the state, a geology heretofore treated by Barbour, and Condra, and Schramm, and to which research and exploration has added much of valuable information. We will tell of the far-off , misty past, when White river, and the Niobrara, Snake creek, Bluewater, the Lodgepole, and the twin merging valleys of the Platte, or Flatwater, and Gonneville, or Pumpkin creek were yet to be. When the surface of the earth was of hot rocks in the forming, and the sky above was hidden in the mists which enveloped our celestial baby world.

At first the sun could hardly penetrate the humid atmosphere, and the dull haze was illumined by lurid igneous fires, but by and by sunlight broke through and startled the concentrating elements to pulsating life -- life that came from the hot ooze of primeval oceans, and which has developed through long laborious years, to busy brain-driven entities.

History is moving rapidly in these later days ; there have been sordid things like war to take time and attention, but at intervals, in silences and solitudes, the mind finds relaxation. The intellect finds restful exercise in contemplation of origin and destiny, or in translation of the silent language of the ages, from the rocks of the pre-historic world.

Clumsily, I have sought to assist, and in reading the rocks, I find the story of the ancient sea, the islands and the antecedent streams of our own state, and this particular part thereof, written legibly upon the cliffs, and in the hills and valleys. So while the floor of the world is granite, we find above that floor, Nebraska, even as it stood in the midst of the first landed area of the earth, while the waves of the Cambrian sea beat upon shores in Wyoming, Ohio and Oklahoma.