tling appearance. Now and then the mountain cleft for a trout brook, elbows against the stream, giving its waters, too swift and shallow for navigable purposes, graceful and gradual fall.

The Lackawanna River rises principally in Susquehanna County, but one considerable branch emerges from the same marshy region in Wayne that sends out the Starucca, Lackawaxen, and Equinunk to join the Delaware, which, after many counter and diverse movements for a distance of at least fifty miles, pours its gentle volume into the Susquehanna at Pittston. Along its banks, shorn of the fairest portion of timber by the lumberman, the landscape is singularly fine, with slope, field, and village, while the stream itself offers to the eye every variety of smooth water, pool, and rapids. Here its margin, rock-bound and abrupt, is carved from the lowbrowed cliff, and there the alluvial meadow or cornfield ready for the husbandman, attests the luxurious character of the soil.

Along the central and lower portion, coal of the finest quality is found in profusion, interstratified in many places with iron-ore of the most desirable and productive character.

The confluence of the Lackawanna and Susquehanna is described in the following beautiful lines by the late Mrs. Sigourney :—

THE SUSQUEHANNA.

ON ITS JUNCTION WITH THE LACKAWANNA.

BY MRS. SIGOURNEY.

Rush on, glad stream, in thy power and pride

To claim the hand of thy promised bride,

For she hastes from the realins of the darkened mine,

To mingle her murmured vows with thine:

Ye have met, ye have met, and your shores prolong
The liquid tone of your nuptial song.

Methinks ye wed as the white man's son
And the child of the Indian King have done.
I saw the bride as she strove in vain

To cleanse her brow from the carbon stain;

But she brings thee a dowry so rich and true
That thy love must not shrink from the tawny hue.

Her birth was rude in a mountain cell,

And her infant freaks there are none to tell;

Yet the path of her beauty was wild and free.
And in dell and forest she hid from thee;
But the day of her fond caprice is o'er,

And she seeks to part from thy breast no more.

Pass on, in the joy of thy blended tide,
Through the land where the blessed Miquon died.
No red-man's blood with its guilty stain,
Hath cried unto God from that broad domain;
With the seeds of peace they have sown the soil,
Bring a harvest of wealth for their hour of toil.

Or, on, through the vale where the brave ones sleep,

Where the waving foliage is rich and deep.

I have stood on the mountain and roamed through the glen,

To the beautiful homes of the Western men;

Yet naught in that region of glory could see

So fair as the vale of Wyoming to me.

WAS WYOMING ONCE A VAST LAKE?

The Kittatinny, or Blue Ridge, which skirts along Pennsylvania and Virginia, is probably one of the most even ranges in the world. At its base it rarely exceeds a mile, while its summit, covered with perpetual foliage, preserves an uniformity of height that distinguishes it from all other mountains stretched across the country.

At some period in the world's history, this ridge doubtless was the margin of a vast lake into which ran the waters of the Chemung, Chenango, Delaware, and the Susquehanna, and over mountain, moor, and valley, rolled one common wave. Evidence of this is written upon rock and mountain around us, while the earth from the

hill-side mine, disdains to conceal its share of the water spoils. The vast quantity of petrified shells, alluvials, and strata of shale and clay and organic remains, found along the Delaware, Lackawanna, and Susquehanna, and many other valleys, and the character of these rivers, all running in a transverse or cross direction, have been compelled to wash out by slow and triumphant progress, or rupture the obstructing heights to find their way to the sea, suggests the inquiry, Were they not once the bottoms of immense lakes? And did not the finny tribes, the huge serpent, and the whale, sport in these inland salt waters in times of yore?

No one can carefully examine the strata of the mountains of the United States, especially, the Alleghanies or Blue Ridge, or even glance at the map, without finding a fact existing in no other part of the world, that all their principal ridges cross the great as well as the lesser rivers, instead of running parallel with them. The Delaware, Susquehanna, Potomac, and Shenandoah, all issue from the steep mountains of the Blue Ridge.

One of the most distinguished authors and eminent naturalists, C. F. Volney, who visited Harper's Ferry in 1796, and who gave the subject great attention and research, believed that "the chain of the Blue Ridge in its entire state, completely denied the Potomac a passage onward, and that then all the waters of the upper part of the river, having no issue, formed several considerable lakes, which spread themselves between the Blue Ridge and the chain at Kittatinny, not only to the Susquehanna and Schuylkill, but beyond the Schuylkill, and even to the Delaware. It is obvious that the lakes flowing off must have changed the whole face of the lower country. Several branches having at once or in succession, given a passage to the streams of water now called James, Potomac, Susquehanna, Schuylkill, and Delaware, their general and common reservoir was divided into as many distinct lakes, separated by the risings of the ground that

exceeded this level. Each of these lakes had its particular drain, and this drain being at length worn down to the lowest level, the land was left completely uncovered. This must have occurred earlier with the James, Susquehanna, and Delaware, because their basins are more elevated, and it must have happened more recently with the Potomac, for the opposite reason, its basin being the deepest of all."

How far the Delaware then extended the reflux of its waters toward the east, he could not ascertain; "however, it appears its basin was bounded by the ridge that accompanies its left bank; and which is the apparent continuation of the Blue Ridge and North Mountain. It is probable that its basin has always been separate from that of the Hudson, as it is certain that the Hudson has always had a distinct basin, the limit and mound of which is above West Point, at a place called the Highlands."1

Schoolcraft and Professor Beck, and other eminent writers, also subscribe to this theory. The basin of the Lackawanna, viewed from the summit of the mountain back of Scranton, or from one of the more elevated points farther up the valley, exhibits the internal appearance and form of a lake so plainly, that the idea of the ancient existence of one here is indubitably forced upon the observer. Other circumstances tend to confirm this impression, as the heaps of detached rock strewn below many of the gorges, especially at the Delaware Water Gap, where the waters were held back until the great embankment gave way before the weight of the vast body of water above, or by attrition, convulsion, or glacier action, and brought down all that stratum of earth and mud which now gives such agricultural strength and value to the shores of the lower Delaware.

A few yards above the bridge, across the Susquehanna at Pittston, can be seen a large rock of many thousand

1 American Antiquities, pp. 352-373.

tons in weight, of which Mr. Charles Miner thus writes: "Standing on the bank of the river, a little below the mouth of the Lackawanna, and looking northward, it ap pears as if by some power little short of omnipotent, the solid rock' had been cloven down near a thousand feet to open a passage for the water. Being on the river-bank twelve years ago, with the able and lamented Mr. Packer, then chairman of the senatorial committee, to view the coal region of Luzerne, he pointed to a huge mass of broken and contorted rock, evidently out of place, which now lies at Pittston Ferry, between the canal and river, and expressed the decided and not improbable opinion, that in the convulsion of nature which separated the mountain above us, this mass must have been torn away and borne by the rushing flood to its present restingplace. Twenty miles below, where the Susquehanna takes leave of the plains, the mountains are equally lofty and precipitous. In many places the rocks distinctly exhibit the abrasions of water many feet above the highest pitch to which the river has ever been known to rise, going to show, that at some very remote period, this had been a lake, and indicating that there had been a chain of lakes probably along the whole line of the stream. Banks of sand-hills, covered with rounded stone, manifestly worn smooth by attrition, similar stones being found wherever wells are sunk, tend to confirm the opinion. The soil is chiefly alluvial, and the whole depth and surface, so far as examined, show great changes by the violent action of water."'2

The existence of this lake or lakes, made by the intervening hills, explains the appearance of the several stages or flats observed along the Wyoming plains and the Lackawanna, and even at Cobb's Gap, where the roaring brook flees from the Pocono, as if the water once had a greater volume than now, or was higher at one period

1 Campbell's Ledge.

2 Miner's History of Wyoming, p. 12.