Andrew Lang - "Helen of Troy"

J. Cuthbert Hadden - "Haydn"

Rabindranath Tagore - "The Post Office"

Samuel Johnson - "Preface to a Dictionary of the English Language"

New Philadelphia Book Publisher Highlights Local Talent
Book and Publishing News from Publishers Newswire(tm)

Looking for Child to be on Cover of a New Book, 'The Model Child'
PHILADELPHIA, Pa. -- The Philadelphia literary world will celebrate the launch of two new players today, April 10th: Kay Square Press, a new publishing company focused on Philadelphia-area artists, their stories, and their art; and Kay Square's first release, 'With the Rich and Mighty: Emlen Etting of Philadelphia' (ISBN: 978-0-9815129-0-7), a critical biography by Kenneth C. Kaleta.

FlatSigned Press Alleges Don Imus Remarks Damage Legacy of President Gerald R. Ford
NEW YORK, N.Y. -- Nathan Yungerberg, an accomplished model scout and professional child photographer is launching a nation-wide casting call to find the cover model for his highly anticipated book release, 'The Model Child: A Parents Guide to the Child Modeling Industry' (ISBN: 978-0-9817018-0-6).

Books: The Elements of Geology

W >> William Harmon Norton >> The Elements of Geology




These Triassic rocks, which are chiefly sandstones, hold no marine
fossils, and hence were not laid in open arms of the sea. But
their layers are often ripple-marked, and contain many tracks of
reptiles, imprints of raindrops, and some fossil wood, while an
occasional bed of shale is filled with the remains of fishes. We
may conceive, then, of the Connecticut valley and the larger
trough to the southwest as basins gradually sinking at a rate
perhaps no faster than that of the New Jersey coast to-day, and as
gradually aggraded by streams from the neighboring uplands. Their
broad, sandy flats were overflowed by wandering streams, and when
subsidence gained on deposition shallow lakes overspread the
alluvial plains. Perhaps now and then the basins became long,
brackish estuaries, whose low shores were swept by the incoming
tide and were in turn left bare at its retreat to receive the rain
prints of passing showers and the tracks of the troops of reptiles
which inhabited these valleys.

The Triassic rocks are mainly red sandstones,--often feldspathic,
or arkose, with some conglomerates and shales. Considering the
large amount of feldspathic material in these rocks, do you infer
that they were derived from the adjacent crystalline and
metamorphic rocks of the oldland of Appalachia, or from the
sedimentary Paleozoic rocks which had been folded into mountains
during the Appalachian deformation? If from the former, was the
drainage of the northern Appalachian mountain region then, as now,
eastward and southeastward toward the Atlantic? The Triassic
sandstones are voluminous, measuring at least a mile in thickness,
and are largely of coarse waste. What do you infer as to the
height of the lands from which the waste was shed, or the
direction of the oscillation which they were then undergoing? In
the southern basins, as about Richmond, Virginia, are valuable
beds of coal; what was the physical geography of these areas when
the coal was being formed?

Interbedded with the Triassic sandstones are contemporaneous lava
beds which were fed from dikes. Volcanic action, which had been
remarkably absent in eastern North America during Paleozoic times,
was well-marked in connection with the warping now in progress.
Thick intrusive sheets have also been driven in among the strata,
as, for example, the sheet of the Palisades of the Hudson,
described on page 269.

The present condition of the Triassic sandstones of the
Connecticut valley is seen in Figure 315. Were the beds laid in
their present attitude? What was the nature of the deformation
which they have suffered? When did the intrusion of lava sheets
take place relative to the deformation? What effect have these
sheets on the present topography, and why? Assuming that the
Triassic deformation went on more rapidly than denudation, what
was its effect on the topography of the time? Are there any of its
results remaining in the topography of to-day? Do the Triassic
areas now stand higher or lower than the surrounding country, and
why? How do the Triassic sandstones and shales compare in hardness
with the igneous and metamorphic rocks about them? The Jurassic
strata are wanting over the Triassic areas and over all of eastern
North America. Was this region land or sea, an area of erosion or
sedimentation, during the Jurassic period? In New Jersey,
Pennsylvania, and farther southwest the lowest strata of the next
period, the Cretaceous, rest on the eroded edges of the earlier
rocks. The surface on which they lie is worn so even that we must
believe that at the opening of the Cretaceous the oldland of
Appalachia, including the Triassic areas, had been baseleveled at
least near the coast. When, therefore, did the deformation of the
Triassic rocks occur?

WESTERN NORTH AMERICA. Triassic strata infolded in the Sierra
Nevada Mountains carry marine fossils and reach a thickness of
nearly five thousand feet. California was then under water, and
the site of the Sierra was a subsiding trough slowly filling with
waste from the Great Basin land to the east.

Over a long belt which reaches from Wyoming across Colorado into
New Mexico no Triassic sediments are found, nor is there any
evidence that they were ever present; hence this area was high
land suffering erosion during the Triassic. On each side of it, in
eastern Colorado and about the Black Hills, in western Texas, in
Utah, over the site of the Wasatch Mountains, and southward into
Arizona over the plateaus trenched by the Colorado River, are
large areas of Triassic rocks, sandstones chiefly, with some rock
salt and gypsum. Fossils are very rare and none of them marine.
Here, then, lay broad shallow lakes often salt, and warped basins,
in which the waste of the adjacent uplands gathered. To this
system belong the sandstones of the Garden of the Gods in
Colorado, which later earth movements have upturned with the
uplifted mountain flanks.

The Jurassic was marked with varied oscillations and wide changes
in the outline of sea and land.

Jurassic shales of immense thickness--now metamorphosed into
slates--are found infolded into the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Hence
during Jurassic times the Sierra trough continued to subside, and
enormous deposits of mud were washed into it from the land lying
to the east. Contemporaneous lava flows interbedded with the
strata show that volcanic action accompanied the downwarp, and
that molten rock was driven upward through fissures in the crust
and outspread over the sea floor in sheets of lava.

THE SIERRA DEFORMATION. Ever since the middle of the Silurian, the
Sierra trough had been sinking, though no doubt with halts and
interruptions, until it contained nearly twenty-five thousand feet
of sediment. At the close of the Jurassic it yielded to lateral
pressure and the vast pile of strata was crumpled and upheaved
into towering mountains. The Mesozoic muds were hardened and
squeezed into slates. The rocks were wrenched and broken, and
underground waters began the work of filling their fissures with
gold-bearing quartz, which was yet to wait millions of years
before the arrival of man to mine it. Immense bodies of molten
rock were intruded into the crust as it suffered deformation, and
these appear in the large areas of granite which the later
denudation of the range has brought to light.

The same movements probably uplifted the rocks of the Coast Range
in a chain of islands. The whole western part of the continent was
raised and its seas and lakes were for the most part drained away.

THE BRITISH ISLES. The Triassic strata of the British Isles are
continental, and include breccia beds of cemented talus, deposits
of salt and gypsum, and sandstones whose rounded and polished
grains are those of the wind-blown sands of deserts. In Triassic
times the British Isles were part of a desert extending over much
of northwestern Europe.

THE CRETACEOUS

The third great system of the Mesozoic includes many formations,
marine and continental, which record a long and complicated
history marked by great oscillations of the crust and wide changes
in the outlines of sea and land.

EARLY CRETACEOUS. In eastern North America the lowest Cretaceous
series comprises fresh-water formations which are traced from
Nantucket across Martha's Vineyard and Long Island, and through
New Jersey southward into Georgia. They rest unconformably on the
Triassic sandstones and the older rocks of the region. The
Atlantic shore line was still farther out than now in the northern
states. Again, as during the Triassic, a warping of the crust
formed a long trough parallel to the coast and to the Appalachian
ridges, but cut off from the sea; and here the continental
deposits of the early Cretaceous were laid.

Along the Gulf of Mexico the same series was deposited under like
conditions over the area known as the Mississippi embayment,
reaching from Georgia northwestward into Tennessee and thence
across into Arkansas and southward into Texas.

In the Southwest the subsidence continued until the transgressing
sea covered most of Mexico and Texas and extended a gulf northward
into Kansas. In its warm and quiet waters limestones accumulated
to a depth of from one thousand to five thousand feet in Texas,
and of more than ten thousand feet in Mexico. Meanwhile the
lowlands, where the Great Plains are now, received continental
deposits; coal swamps stretched from western Montana into British
Columbia.

THE MIDDLE CRETACEOUS. This was a land epoch. The early Cretaceous
sea retired from Texas and Mexico, for its sediments are overlain
unconformably by formations of the Upper Cretaceous. So long was
the time gap between the two series that no species found in the
one occurs in the other.

THE UPPER CRETACEOUS. There now began one of the most remarkable
events in all geological history,--the great Cretaceous
subsidence. Its earlier warpings were recorded in continental
deposits,--wide sheets of sandstone, shale, and some coal,--which
were spread from Texas to British Columbia. These continental
deposits are overlain by a succession of marine formations whose
vast area is shown on the map, Figure 260. We may infer that as
the depression of the continent continued the sea came in far and
wide over the coast lands and the plains worn low during the
previous epochs. Upper Cretaceous formations show that south of
New England the waters of the Atlantic somewhat overlapped the
crystalline rocks of the Piedmont Belt and spread their waste over
the submerged coastal plain. The Gulf of Mexico again covered the
Mississippi embayment, reaching as far north as southern Illinois,
and extended over Texas.

A mediterranean sea now stretched from the Gulf to the arctic
regions and from central Iowa to the eastern shore of the Great
Basin land at about the longitude of Salt Lake City, the Colorado
Mountains rising from it in a chain of islands. Along with minor
oscillations there were laid in the interior sea various
formations of sandstones, shales, and limestones, and from Kansas
to South Dakota beds of white chalk show that the clear, warm
waters swarmed at times with foraminiferal life whose
disintegrating microscopic shells accumulated in this rare
deposit.

At this epoch a wide sea, interrupted by various islands,
stretched across Eurasia from Wales and western Spain to China,
and spread southward over much of the Sahara. To the west its
waters were clear and on its floor the crumbled remains of
foraminifers gathered in heavy accumulations of calcareous ooze,--
the white chalk of France and England. Sea urchins were also
abundant, and sponges contributed their spicules to form nodules
of flint.

THE LARAMIE. The closing stage of the Cretaceous was marked in
North America by a slow uplift of the land. As the interior sea
gradually withdrew, the warping basins of its floor were filled
with waste from the rising lands about them, and over this wide
area there were spread continental deposits in fresh-water lakes
like the Great Lakes of the present, in brackish estuaries, and in
river plains, while occasional oscillations now and again let in
the sea. There were vast marshes in which there accumulated the
larger part of the valuable coal seams of the West. The Laramie is
the coal-bearing series of the West, as the Pennsylvanian is of
the eastern part of our country.

THE ROCKY MOUNTAIN DEFORMATION. At the close of the Cretaceous we
enter upon an epoch of mountain-making far more extensive than any
which the continent had witnessed. The long belt lying west of the
ancient axes of the Colorado Islands and east of the Great Basin
land had been an area of deposition for many ages, and in its
subsiding troughs Paleozoic and Mesozoic sediments had gathered to
the depth of many thousand feet. And now from Mexico well-nigh to
the Arctic Ocean this belt yielded to lateral pressure. The
Cretaceous limestones of Mexico were folded into lofty mountains.
A massive range was upfolded where the Wasatch Mountains now are,
and various ranges of the Rockies in Colorado and other states
were upridged. However slowly these deformations were effected
they were no doubt accompanied by world-shaking earthquakes, and
it is known that volcanic eruptions took place on a magnificent
scale. Outflows of lava occurred along the Wasatch, the laccoliths
of the Henry Mountains were formed, while the great masses of
igneous rock which constitute the cores of the Spanish Peaks and
other western mountains were thrust up amid the strata. The high
plateaus from which many of these ranges rise had not yet been
uplifted, and the bases of the mountains probably stood near the
level of the sea.

North America was now well-nigh completed. The mediterranean seas
which so often had occupied the heart of the land were done away
with, and the continent stretched unbroken from the foot of the
Sierras on the west to the Fall Line of the Atlantic coastal plain
on the east.

THE MESOZOIC PENEPLAIN. The immense thickness of the Mesozoic
formations conveys to our minds some idea of the vast length of
time involved in the slow progress of its successive ages. The
same lesson is taught as plainly by the amount of denudation which
the lands suffered during the era.

The beginning of the Mesozoic saw a system of lofty mountain
ranges stretching from New York into central Alabama. The end of
this long era found here a wide peneplain crossed by sluggish
wandering rivers and overlooked by detached hills as yet unreduced
to the general level. The Mesozoic era was long enough for the
Appalachian Mountains, upridged at its beginning, to have been
weathered and worn away and carried grain by grain to the sea. The
same plain extended over southern New England. The Taconic range,
uplifted partially at least at the close of the Ordovician, and
the block mountains of the Triassic, together with the pre-
Cambrian mountains of ancient Appalachia, had now all been worn to
a common level with the Allegheny ranges. The Mesozoic peneplain
has been upwarped by later crustal movements and has suffered
profound erosion, but the remnants of it which remain on the
upland of southern New England and the even summits of the
Allegheny ridges suffice to prove that it once existed. The age of
the Mesozoic peneplain is determined from the fact that the lower
Tertiary sediments were deposited on its even surface when at the
close of the era the peneplain was depressed along its edges
beneath the sea.

LIFE OF THE MESOZOIC

PLANT LIFE OF THE TRIASSIC AND JURASSIC. The Carboniferous forests
of lepidodendrons and sigillafids had now vanished from the earth.
The uplands were clothed with conifers, like the Araucarian pines
of South America and Australia. Dense forests of tree ferns throve
in moist regions, and canebrakes of horsetails of modern type, but
with stems reaching four inches in thickness, bordered the lagoons
and marshes. Cycads were exceedingly abundant. These gymnosperms,
related to the pines and spruces in structure and fruiting, but
palmlike in their foliage, and uncoiling their long leaves after
the manner of ferns, culminated in the Jurassic. From the view
point of the botanist the Mesozoic is the Age of Cycads, and after
this era they gradually decline to the small number of species now
existing in tropical latitudes.

PLANT LIFE OF THE CRETACEOUS. In the Lower Cretaceous the
woodlands continued of much the same type as during the Jurassic.
The forerunners now appeared of the modern dicotyls (plants with
two seed leaves), and in the Middle Cretaceous the
monocotyledonous group of palms came in. Palms are so like cycads
that we may regard them as the descendants of some cycad type.

In the UPPER CRETACEOUS, cycads become rare. The highest types of
flowering plants gain a complete ascendency, and forests of modern
aspect cover the continent from the Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic
Ocean. Among the kinds of forest trees whose remains are found in
the continental deposits of the Cretaceous are the magnolia, the
myrtle, the laurel, the fig, the tulip tree, the chestnut, the
oak, beech, elm, poplar, willow, birch, and maple. Forests of
Eucalyptus grew along the coast of New England, and palms on the
Pacific shores of British Columbia. Sequoias of many varieties
ranged far into northern Canada. In northern Greenland there were
luxuriant forests of magnolias, figs, and cycads; and a similar
flora has been disinterred from the Cretaceous rocks of Alaska and
Spitzbergen. Evidently the lands within the Arctic Circle enjoyed
a warm and genial climate, as they had done during the Paleozoic.
Greenland had the temperature of Cuba and southern Florida, and
the time was yet far distant when it was to be wrapped in glacier
ice.

INVERTEBRATES. During the long succession of the ages of the
Mesozoic, with their vast geographical changes, there were many
and great changes in organisms. Species were replaced again and
again by others better fitted to the changing environment. During
the Lower Cretaceous alone there were no less than six successive
changes in the faunas which inhabited the limestone-making sea
which then covered Texas. We shall disregard these changes for the
most part in describing the life of the era, and shall confine our
view to some of the most important advances made in the leading
types.

Stromatopora have disappeared. Protozoans and sponges are
exceedingly abundant, and all contribute to the making of Mesozoic
strata. Corals have assumed a more modern type. Sea urchins have
become plentiful; crinoids abound until the Cretaceous, where they
begin their decline to their present humble station.

Trilobites and eurypterids are gone. Ten-footed crustaceans abound
of the primitive long-tailed type (represented by the lobster and
the crayfish), and in the Jurassic there appears the modern short-
tailed type represented by the crabs. The latter type is higher in
organization and now far more common. In its embryological
development it passes through the long-tailed stage; connecting
links in the Mesozoic also indicate that the younger type is the
offshoot of the older.

Insects evolve along diverse lines, giving rise to beetles, ants,
bees, and flies.

Brachiopods have dwindled greatly in the number of their species,
while mollusks have correspondingly increased. The great oyster
family dates from here.

Cephalopods are now to have their day. The archaic Orthoceras
lingers on into the Triassic and becomes extinct, but a remarkable
development is now at hand for the more highly organized
descendants of this ancient line. We have noticed that in the
Devonian the sutures of some of the chambered shells become
angled, evolving the Goniatite type. The sutures now become lobed
and corrugated in Ceratites. The process was carried still
farther, and the sutures were elaborately frilled in the great
order of the Ammonites. It was in the Jurassic that the Ammonites
reached their height. No fossils are more abundant or
characteristic of their age. Great banks of their shells formed
beds of limestone in warm seas the world over.

The ammonite stem branched into a most luxuriant variety of forms.
The typical form was closely coiled like a nautilus. In others the
coil was more or less open, or even erected into a spiral. Some
were hook-shaped, and there were members of the order in which the
shell was straight, and yet retained all the internal structures
of its kind. At the end of the Mesozoic the entire tribe of
ammonites became extinct.

The Belemnite (Greek, belemnon, a dart) is a distinctly higher
type of cephalopod which appeared in the Triassic, became numerous
and varied in the Jurassic and Cretaceous, and died out early in
the Tertiary. Like the squids and cuttlefish, of which it was the
prototype, it had an internal calcareous shell. This consisted of
a chambered and siphuncled cone, whose point was sheathed in a
long solid guard somewhat like a dart. The animal carried an ink
sac, and no doubt used it as that of the modern cuttlefish is
used,--to darken the water and make easy an escape from foes.
Belemnites have sometimes been sketched with fossil sepia, or
india ink, from their own ink sacs. In the belemnites and their
descendants, the squids and cuttlefish, the cephalopods made the
radical change from external to the internal shell. They abandoned
the defensive system of warfare and boldly took up the offensive.
No doubt, like their descendants, the belemnites were exceedingly
active and voracious creatures.

FISHES AND AMPHIBIANS. In the Triassic and Jurassic, little
progress was made among the fishes, and the ganoid was still the
leading type. In the Cretaceous the teleosts, or bony fishes, made
their appearance, while ganoids declined toward their present
subordinate place.

The amphibians culminated in the Triassic, some being formidable
creatures as large as alligators. They were still of the primitive
Paleozoic types. Their pygmy descendants of more modern types are
not found until later, salamanders appearing first in the
Cretaceous, and frogs at the beginning of the Cenozoic.

No remains of amphibians have been discovered in the Jurassic. Do
you infer from this that there were none in existence at that
time?

REPTILES OF THE MESOZOIC

The great order of Reptiles made its advent in the Permian,
culminated in the Triassic and Jurassic, and began to decline in
the Cretaceous. The advance from the amphibian to the reptile was
a long forward step in the evolution of the vertebrates. In the
reptile the vertebrate skeleton now became completely ossified.
Gills were abandoned and breathing was by lungs alone. The
development of the individual from the egg to maturity was
uninterrupted by any metamorphosis, such as that of the frog when
it passes from the tadpole stage. Yet in advancing from the
amphibian to the reptile the evolution of the vertebrate was far
from finished. The cold-blooded, clumsy and sluggish, small-
brained and unintelligent reptile is as far inferior to the higher
mammals, whose day was still to come, as it is superior to the
amphibian and the fish.

The reptiles of the Permian, the earliest known, were much like
lizards in form of body. Constituting a transition type between
the amphibians on the one hand, and both the higher reptiles and
the mammals on the other, they retained the archaic biconcave
vertebra of the fish and in some cases the persistent notochord,
while some of them, the theromorphs, possessed characters allying
them with mammals. In these the skull was remarkably similar to
that of the carnivores, or flesh-eating mammals, and the teeth,
unlike the teeth of any later reptiles, were divisible into
incisors, canines, and molars, as are the teeth of mammals.

At the opening of the Mesozoic era reptiles were the most highly
organized and powerful of any animals on the earth. New ranges of
continental extent were opened to them, food was abundant, the
climate was congenial, and they now branched into very many
diverse types which occupied and ruled all fields,--the land, the
air, and the sea. The Mesozoic was the Age of Reptiles.

THE ANCESTRY OF SURVIVING REPTILIAN TYPES. We will consider first
the evolution of the few reptilian types which have survived to
the present.

Crocodiles, the highest of existing reptiles, are a very ancient
order, dating back to the lower Jurassic, and traceable to earlier
ancestral, generalized forms, from which sprang several other
orders also.

Turtles and tortoises are not found until the early Jurassic, when
they already possessed the peculiar characteristics which set them
off so sharply from other reptiles. They seem to have lived at
first in shallow water and in swamps, and it is not until after
the end of the Mesozoic that some of the order became adapted to
life on the land.

The largest of all known turtles, Archelon, whose home was the
great interior Cretaceous sea, was fully a dozen feet in length
and must have weighed at least two tons. The skull alone is a yard
long.

Lizards and snakes do not appear until after the close of the
Mesozoic, although their ancestral lines may be followed back into
the Cretaceous.

We will now describe some of the highly specialized orders
peculiar to the Mesozoic.

LAND REPTILES. The DINOSAURS (terrible reptiles) are an extremely
varied order which were masters of the land from the late Trias
until the close of the Mesozoic era. Some were far larger than
elephants, some were as small as cats; some walked on all fours,
some were bipedal; some fed on the luxuriant tropical foliage, and
others on the flesh of weaker reptiles. They may be classed in
three divisions,--the FLESH-EATING DINOSAURS, the REPTILE-FOOTED
DINOSAURS, and the BEAKED DINOSAURS,--the latter two divisions
being herbivorous.

The FLESH-EATING DINOSAURS are the oldest known division of the
order, and their characteristics are shown in Figure 329. As a
class, reptiles are egg layers (oviparous); but some of the flesh-
eating dinosaurs are known to have been VIVIPAROUS, i.e. to have
brought forth their young alive. This group was the longest-lived
of any of the three, beginning in the Trias and continuing to the
close of the Mesozoic era.