iscovered that the fossils
in rocks, instead of being scattered haphazard, are arranged in regular
systems, so that any given stratum of rock is labelled by its fossil
population; that the order of succession of such groups of fossils is
always the same in any vertical series of strata in which they occur, and
that a fossil, having once disappeared, never reappears in a later stratum.
The facts which he unearthed were as iconoclastic in their field as the
discoveries of Copernicus and Galileo.

[Sidenote: Spanish civil war]

[Sidenote: Carlist reverses]

[Sidenote: Flight of Don Carlos]

[Sidenote: Decline of Spain]

In Spain, a signal defeat of the Carlists at Pennecerrada during the
previous year had caused a decisive turn in the civil war. Don Carlos'
attempted march on Madrid had to be abandoned, and was followed by the
retreat of his forces to the Ebro. General Espartero forced back the
Carlist forces step by step, and carried the fight into the Basque
provinces. There the struggle degenerated into a war of extermination. The
Carlist leaders turned against one another. The priests excommunicated the
generals, and the generals in turn shot the priests. At last, by the middle
of September, so many of the insurgents had surrendered to Espartero that
Don Carlos found himself almost without followers. He gave up the struggle
and fled into France. This ended the civil war. It had lasted six weary
years, and had proved almost as disastrous for Spain as the great
Peninsular War. Robbed of her former colonial resources, excepting only
those from Cuba and the Philippines, Spain's finances were all but ruined.
Of industrial progress there was next to none. The country relapsed into
semi-barbarism.

[Sidenote: American Whig Convention]

[Sidenote: Henry Clay's candidacy.]

[Sidenote: Financial failures]

[Sidenote: Longfellow's poems]

In the United States, prominent Northern abolitionists met at Warsaw, New
York, and resolved to form an independent political party. A Whig
Convention, the first of such gatherings, was held at Harrisburg, fifteen
months before the next Presidential election. Harrison was nominated for
President and John Tyler for Vice-President. In the West, Henry Clay,
popularly known as "Harry of the West," was the ideal of a strong minority.
His repeated failures to attain the Presidency led to the remark: "He is
too good a man to be President." The first session of the Twenty-sixth
Congress ope