[216] Dr. John Bigsby, in a memoir read before the London Geological Society, has described and figured several of these. In a memoir by Charles Stokes, Esq., of London, read before this Society in June, 1837, some of its most striking fossils are figured and described, with references to the prior discoveries of Dr. Bigsby, Captain Bayfield, and Dr. Richardson. Six new species of the Arctinoceras, and five of the Huronia, Ormoceras, and Orthocerata, are figured and described in the most splendid manner. This memoir is essential to all who would understand its fossil history, and that of the North generally.
[217] Strong water.
[218] Reached somewhere about 1641, by the French missionaries.
[219] In 1825, Lieutenant Charles F. Morton, U. S. A., sent to my office a mass of this red sand rock, of about twelve inches diameter, perfectly round and ball-shaped, which he had directed one of the soldiers to pick up, in an excursion among the islands of the lower St. Mary's. This ball was a monument of that physical throe which had originally carried this river through the sandstone pass of St. Mary's, having been manifestly rounded in what geologists have called "a pocket hole" in the rock at the falls, and afterwards carried away, with the disrupted rocks, down the valley.
[220] The Indiana call it Pauwateeg (water leaping on the rocks), when speaking of the phenomenon, and Pawating, when referring to the place of it.
[221] During a subsequent residence of eleven years at this point, the excavations made on both sides of the river, in digging wells, canals made by the military, &c., fully demonstrated the truth of this general observation. In these positions, it was evident that some greatly superior force of watery removal, such as does not now exist, had heaped together particles of similar matters, according to laws which govern moving, compacted masses of water, leaving clay to settle according to the laws of diffused clay, sand of sand, and pebbles and boulders of pebbles and boulders. In their change and redeposit, gravity has evidently been the primary cause, modified by compressed currents, attraction, and probably those secret and still undeveloped magnetic and electric influences which exist in connection with astronomical phenomena. That the earth's surface, "standing out of the water and in the water," has been disrupted and preyed upon by oceanic power, no one, at this day of geological illumination, will deny.
[222] In 1831, in making some explorations of this rock with gunpowder, I found the serpentine in a crystalline state, of a beautiful deep-green color, but appearing as if the crystallization was pseudomorphous.
[223] The extensive iron mines of Marquette County, Upper Michigan, are now worked in this vicinity.
[224] Porcupine Mountains. From kaug, a porcupine, and wudju, mountain.
[225] Vide my view of the lead mines, in the Appendix to "Scenes and Adventures in the Ozark Mountains."