hybrid product, which
obeys half way the law of currents, and half way that of vegetation. As
it flows it takes the forms of sappy leaves or vines, making heaps of
pulpy sprays a foot or more in depth, and resembling, as you look
down on them, the laciniated, lobed, and imbricated thalluses of some
lichens; or you are reminded of coral, of leopard's paws or birds' feet,
of brains or lungs or bowels, and excrements of all kinds. It is a truly
grotesque vegetation, whose forms and color we see imitated in bronze,
a sort of architectural foliage more ancient and typical than acanthus,
chiccory, ivy, vine, or any vegetable leaves; destined perhaps, under
some circumstances, to become a puzzle to future geologists. The whole
cut impressed me as if it were a cave with its stalactites laid open
to the light. The various shades of the sand are singularly rich and
agreeable, embracing the different iron colors, brown, gray, yellowish,
and reddish. When the flowing mass reaches the drain at the foot of the
bank it spreads out flatter into strands, the separate streams losing
their semi-cylindrical form and gradually becoming more flat and broad,
running together as they are more moist, till they form an almost flat
sand, still variously and beautifully shaded, but in which you can trace
the original forms of vegetation; till at length, in the water itself,
they are converted into banks, like those formed off the mouths of
rivers, and the forms of vegetation are lost in the ripple marks on the
bottom.

The whole bank, which is from twenty to forty feet high, is sometimes
overlaid with a mass of this kind of foliage, or sandy rupture, for a
quarter of a mile on one or both sides, the produce of one spring day.
What makes this sand foliage remarkable is its springing into existence
thus suddenly. When I see on the one side the inert bank--for the sun
acts on one side first--and on the other this luxuriant foliage, the
creation of an hour, I am affected as if in a peculiar sense I stood
in the laboratory of the Artist who made the world and me--had come to
where he was still at work, sporting on this bank, and with excess of
energy strewing his fresh designs about. I feel as if I were nearer to
the vitals of the globe, for this sandy overflow is something such a
foliaceous mass as the vitals of the animal body. You find thus in the
very sands an anticipation of the vegetable leaf. No wonder that the
earth expresses itself outwardly