farther inland. Over where Portland now stands, these waters were 325 feet deep; over Salem, 165 feet; over Albany, 115 feet; over Tualatin Plains, 145 feet; over Lafayette, 170 feet. A narrow strait, over the present valley of the Tualatin River, ten or twelve miles in length, opened westward upon a broad, beautiful bay, extending over the present sites of Hillsboro and Forest Grove, to Gale's Peak, among the foot-hills of the Coast Range. The subsoil of the fine farms of that rich agricultural region, is itself the muddy sediment of that bay. Farther south, over the central portion of the present valley, and lying obliquely across the widest part of that Wallamet Sound, there arose above those waters an elevated island. It extended from a point south of Lafayette to one near Salem, and must have formed a fine central object in the scene. Three or four volcanic islands extended, in an irregular semicircle, where Linn County now is; and the islands of those waters are the Buttes of to-day—Knox's, Peterson's, and Ward's. One standing on the summit of either of these Buttes, with the suggestions of these pages before him, could so easily and vividly imagine those waters recalled, as to almost persuade himself he heard the murmuring of their ripples at his feet—so sea-like, the extended plain around him—so shore-like, that line of hills, from Mary's Peak, on the west, to Spencer's Butte, on the south, and only lost, on the east, among the intricate windings of extended slopes among the foot-hills of the Cascades. How natural would seem to him this restoration of one of geology's yesterdays!
"The shores of that fine old Wallamet Sound teemed with the life of the period. It is marvelous, that so few excavations in the Wallamet Valley have failed to
