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Show 1836- 1837] Fogg's F* r West 345 striking to warrant comparison. The pampas, the steppes, and the sand- plains, though not unlike in the more prominent characteristics, are yet widely different [ 97] in configuration, extent, and soil. The prairie combines characteristics of each, exhibiting features of all in common, of no one in particular. Who would institute comparison between the dark- rolling luxuriance of the North American prairie, and the gloomy moor of Northern Europe, with its heavy, funereal mantle of heather and ling. Could the rifest fancy conjure up the weird sisters, all " so withered and so wild in their attire," upon these beautiful plains of the departed mini! Nor do we meet in the thyme-breathing downs of " merry England," the broad rich levels of France, the grape- clad highlands of Spain, or in the golden mellowness of the Italian Campagna, with a similitude of feature sufficiently striking to identify our own glorious prairies with them. Europe can boast, indeed, no peculiarity of surface assuming like configuration or exhibiting like phenomena. When, then, we reflect, that of all those plains which spread out themselves upon our globe, the North American prairie possesses characteristics peculiar to itself, and to be met with nowhere beside; when we consider the demonstrations of a soil of origin incontestably diluvial; when we wander over the heaving, billowy surface, and behold it strewed with the rocky offspring of another region, and, at intervals, encased in the saline crust of the ocean- sediment; when we dive into its fathomless bosom, and bring forth the crumbling relics of man and animal from sepulchres into which, for untold cycles, they have been entombed; and when we linger along those rolling streams by which they [ 98] are intersected, and behold upon their banks the mighty indications of whirling, subsiding floods, and behold buried in the heart of the everlasting rock |