From the highest points in any river valley to the sea level the broken-up rock, which we term soil, is in process of continuous motion. Everywhere the rain water, flowing over the surface or soaking through the porous mass, is conveying portions of the material which is taken into solution in a speedy manner to the sea. Everywhere the expansion of the soil in freezing, or the movements imposed on it by the growth of roots, by the overturning of trees, or by the innumerable borings and burrowings which animals make in the mass, is through the action of gravitation slowly working down the slope. Every little disturbance of the grains or fragments of the soil which lifts them up causes them when they fall to descend a little way farther toward the sea level. Working toward the streams, the materials of the soil are in time delivered to those flowing waters, and by them urged speedily, though in most cases interruptedly, toward the ocean. There is another element in the movement of the soils which, though less appreciable, is still of great importance. The agents of decay which produce and remove the detritus, the chemical changes of the bed rock, and the mechanical action which roots apply to them, along with the solutional processes, are constantly lowering the surface of the mass. In this way we can often prove that a soil continuously existing has worked downward through many thousand feet of strata. In this process of downgoing the country on which the layer rests may have greatly changed its form, but the deposit, under favourable conditions, may continue to retain some trace of the materials which it derived from beds which have long since disappeared, their position having been far up in the spaces now occupied by the air. Where the slopes are steep and streams abound, we rarely find detritus which belonged in rock more than a hundred feet above the present surface of the soil. Where, however, as on those isolated table-lands or buttes which abound in certain portions of the Mississippi Valley, as well as in many other countries, we find a patch of soil lying on a nearly level surface, which for geologic ages has not felt the effect of streams, we may discover, commingled in the _debris_, the harder wreckage derived from the decay of a thousand feet or more of vanished strata.