142 KANSAS ACADEMY OF SCIENCE. 



These ranges average from 9000 to 11,000 feet in height, in order from 

 east to west, the longest having least altitude and the shortest, or 

 western, the greatest. The intervening troughs have few, if any, in- 

 trusives, and are occupied by tributaries of the Pecos river, deeply 

 canyoned in their upper courses, and with narrow, fertile valleys near 

 their points of issue. The ranges vary somewhat in the character of 

 their granitic masses. The eastern is fine-grained, the middle syen- 

 itic, and the western with large crystals of red feldspar. 



To indulge a somewhat grotesque but instructive imagination, one 

 may picture a huge book, so bound that its pages lie flat when opened, 

 with its back on the Kansas- Colorado line, its top to the south, and 

 the right and left outer edges of its leaves resting on the Rocky 

 Mountains and the Kansas-Missouri boundary. The outer edges on 

 the left will be imbricated like the shingles on a roof ; they will rep- 

 resent the Kansas stratigraphic exposition. Let the outer edges on 

 the right be somewhat crumpled and turned up ; they will represent 

 the stratigraphic exposition of eastern Colorado. Imagine the Sangre 

 de Cristo to be the right arm of the titanic book reader, with his wrist 

 and hand resting on the breast of New Mexico from the top of the 

 sternum to the xyphoid cartilage. The Raton mountains represent 

 an enlarged inner condyle of the radius; the Cimarron mountains 

 will represent the thumb ; the Mora spur the forefinger, and the 

 tripartite main range the remaining digits. East of these latter is 

 Las Vegas, west is Santa Fe, and the A. T. & S. F. railroad skirts the 

 finger tips to reach the Rio Grande valley. Fancy these enormous 

 fingers of a titan thrust into the leaves of another volume, upturning 

 their leaves, tearing, crushing and crumpling them ; the torn and 

 jagged edges will in part typify New Mexican sedimentary strata. 



In a general way the granitic mountains of the territory are ranged 

 in north and south lines. A series of short ranges begins just a little 

 southwest of the Sangre de Cristo and extends on the east side of the 

 Rio Grande into Texas, and, crossing the river, continues into Mexico. 

 The crests of its interrupted segments are from 8000 to 10,600 feet above 

 sea-level. The ranges have but little breadth, but overlap each other 

 in places, and their linear directions often differ by considerable 

 angles. One flank of each mountain is an escarpment and the other 

 strata blanketed. The average distance of this line of short ranges 

 from the Rio Grande is about thirty miles. On the other side of the 

 .valley, at a distance averaging seventy-five miles from the stream, is 

 the drainage axis of the continent, the "continental divide," so called. 

 This is not a mountain range, in its northern part, but a tract of high 

 mesas of stratified rock. Cretaceous. Granite hills protrude in places, 

 giving evidence that at the base the axis is of that nature. Further 

 south, and crossing the line of the Santa Fe railroad, western division, 



