in its inhabitants and in their literacy, language, architecture, manners, and morals, primarily because it belongs to what geologists classify as the deeply dissected loess-covered Kansan drift sheet. The inductive history of Linn county, reasoned out from what we have learned of the lie of the land, the shapes of hills and valleys, the soils and subsoils, and the underlying rocks, is a wonderfully long one. The first chapter that has been opened to inspection in the geologic record of our area is that of the deepest rocks probed by the first deep well drilled at Cedar Rapids. At a depth of 2,150 feet from the surface--1,417 feet below the level of the sea--the drill encountered a hard red siliceous rock which may be taken as the equivalent of the _Sioux Quartzite_, which comes to the surface at Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and at Baraboo, Wisconsin. This well known building stone is used in a number of the business blocks and private residences of Cedar Rapids, as for example in the old office building of the _Republican_. Belonging to the Algonkian, an era so remote that its age must be reckoned in scores if not in hundreds of millions of years, the quartzite at the bottom of the deep well tells of time inconceivably remote when Linn county was part of a wide sea floor on which red sands were washed to and fro and finally laid to rest in thick deposits of sandstone. Tilted and folded and hardened by pressure, the Algonkian rocks were uplifted from the sea to form dry land of mountainous heights. After the lapse of ages the old land sunk beneath the sea, and again and again with intervals of uplift and subaerial erosion there were laid upon it sea muds, impure limestones, and thick sandstones during a long succession of geologic aeons. Samples of these deposits can be seen in the well drillings preserved in the Y. M. C. A. at Cedar Rapids and in the collections of Cornell College. For many millions of years Linn county was thus sometimes land and sometimes sea, but neither land nor sea was tenanted by aught but the humblest of living creatures. These ancient deposits concern us because they are the aqueducts by which artesian waters of purest quality are brought to our doors from their sources far to the northward in other states. [Illustration: INDEPENDENCE SHALES on C., R. I. & P. Ry. below Cedar Rapids] [Illustration: BLUFF AT KENWOOD PARK] [Illustration: EXPOSURE OF BRECCIATED LIMESTONE IN MILWAUKEE CUT AT LINN JUNCTION] [Illustration: "THE BLOW OUT," PALISADES] [Illustration: A FIRST SETTLER, NEAR MT. VERNON] [Illustration: PALISADES]