The first and most important element of the earth’s crust is carbon. Of the more than 60,000 feet of aqueous beds there are probably none that it does not enter into as an important factor. It was first driven from the earth by intense heat. The burning world was a smoking world. The unconsumed carbon commingled with the Annular vapors in the form of black, sooty, pitchy matter. This was deposited at the time of the deluge, and the waters that stood in seas, lakes and ponds deposited it as a layer of black, carbonaceous mud upon their bottoms. It may be found in ten thousand lakes planted in the Drift deposits in North America and Northern Europe. A black carbonaceous soil covers many Western States which were once covered by a vast inland sea. This sea was bounded on the west by the Rocky Mountains; south by the Ozark Mountains and the mountains of Tennessee and Kentucky, and emptied its waters into Lake Michigan. This great inland sea finally became a fresh-water body. The remains of the mastodon, mammoth and other pachyderms of interdiluvian times, as well as fresh-water shells are found. It made for itself two great outlets, the Mississippi and the St. Lawrence rivers. This inland sea must have been elevated 700 or 800 feet above the ocean, and was surrounded on all sides by walls, and covered an area of at least 500,000 square miles. We must conclude that some great down-rush of waters caused it to break its bounds in two directions at the same time. The fall of waters supplied the black, sooty carbon that settled to the bottom of the sea, remaining but a few inches thick on the hills, perhaps, but several feet in the valleys, and is the source of the peat bogs. GLACIAL EPOCHS. Previous to the glacial record there had closed a long period of perpetual spring. The primitive elephant, and many of his congeners and contemporaries, fed in luxurious forests and grassy plains toward the north pole, which are now covered with glaciers grinding their bones to dust. Northern regions which for untold ages had been covered with tropical vegetation, and animals of innumerable forms, began to be invaded by glaciers which slowly made their way toward the equator. The only way glaciers are now formed is by vapors wafted over them from adjacent lands warmed by solar heat; but they were not formed that way during the glacial epochs, but by the declension of annular vapors. Glacial ice cannot accumulate extensively now. _It flows_, and cannot be heaped up largely, its rate of motion being proportionate to the slope of its bed. The source of those snows which built a great continental ice cap over the northern hemisphere must be attributed to the Annular System. They accumulated in the St. Lawrence valley several thousand feet thick and towered over the New England mountains.