e of water-ponds, and of course to
lay open all the streams for navigation." Nor does Madison seem to have
been one of those who doubted if anything was to come of Rumsey's
invention. All this was less than a hundred years ago, and now there is
a steam-ferry between New York and Europe running about twice a day.

In a similar letter, a year later, he is careful, among grave political
matters, to remember and report to the same friend that in the sinking
of a well in Richmond, on the declivity of a hill, there had been found,
"about seventy feet below the surface, several large bones, apparently
belonging to a fish not less than the shark; and, what is more
singular, several fragments of potter's ware in the style of the
Indians. Before he [the digger] reached these curiosities he passed
through about fifty feet of soft blue clay." Mr. Madison had only just
heard of this discovery, and he had not seen the unearthed fragments.
But he evidently accepts the story as true in coming from
"unexceptionable witnesses." He adds, as a corroboration, that he is
told by a friend from Washington County of the finding there, in the
sinking of a salt-well, "of the hip-bone of the incognitum, the socket
of which was about eight inches in diameter." Such things were
peculiarly interesting to Jefferson, and Madison was too devoted a
friend to him to leave them unnoticed. But they were hardly less
interesting to himself, though he had not much of Jefferson's habit of
scientific investigation. That "the potter's ware in the style of the
Indians" should be found so deeply buried only seems to him "singular;"
nor, indeed, is there any record, so far as we know, that this
particular fact was any more suggestive to Jefferson, though apparently
so likely to arouse his inquiring mind to seek for some satisfactory
explanation. But his geological notions were too positive to admit even
of a doubt as to the age of man. Supposing a Creator, he assumed that
"he created the earth at once, nearly in the state in which we see it,
fit for the preservation of the beings he placed on it." Theorist as he
was himself, he had little patience with the other theorists who were
already beginning to discover in the structure of the earth the evidence
of successive geological eras. The different strata of rocks and their
inclination gave him no trouble. He explained them all by the assumption
that "rock grows, and it seems that it grows in layers in every
direction