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Show CHAPTER XXI. A MIBACLE OP NATURE. On the earth's surface there is no plat of ground bristling with sharper problems for the microscopist, or that offers to the analyst more interesting specimens for examination, than the eight or ten square miles of land in northeastern Arizona, known as the Petrified Forest. Here nature exults in accomplished miracles, in mar velous and seemingly impossible transmutations, in achievements transcending imagination and the possi bilities of science. Here, where the giant trees fell in the days before man was upon the earth to count time, they lie to- day, with shape and outline unchanged, with bark and cell and nodule unaltered to the eye, with everything the same save that alone which constitutes a tree and gives to it its own specific name. Here, for miles around, the land is chased with unpolished jewels, which ask but the touch of the lapidary's art to reproduce Milton's " firmament of living sapphires." They re main with us to bear imperishable testimony to the dec laration of the evangelist, that, " with God, all things are possible." When the adventurous Spaniards returned home from the Orinoco and the shores of the Spanish Main, after their fruitless expedition in quest of the " El Dorado" the gilded man and told of the wondrous things and monstrous creations they had seen the Lake of Pitch, the disappearing rivers, the land and sea monsters, the men with tails, the Amazons, the female warriors who gave their name to the greatest river in America the |