218 Annals of the Carnegie Museum. 



then suddenly changes from black to red where the coal has been 

 burned and the rock baked to a brick-red color. 



We are now entering a region interesting to the traveller and sight- 

 seer as well as to the geologist. There is, perhaps, nothing else just 

 like it. When first seen it seems weird and fantasticand it impresses 

 one as being the wreck of a former world, or of one not yet organized. 

 But when more perfectly understood there is no place where certain 

 geological processes are more plainly revealed. In the near distance 

 are low, bare, gray mounds standing on grassy flats and red hills, which 

 look as if they had been painted. Farther away there is a wilderness 

 of high hills, long grassy mounds and dome-shaped conical buttes. 

 In other places there are mounds, red, green, and gray, scattered here 

 and there over gray flats. The more level tracts, which run among the 

 hills, sometimes for a moment seem to have their loneliness relieved 

 by the appearance of flocks of sheep ; but a more careful examination 

 shows that what were at first supposed to be living animals are only gray 

 bunches of sage-brush. Occasionally by a ravine with sloping sides 

 and soft cut-banks stands a solitary cottonwood. To the southward 

 in the distance is a vast range of gray hills, mounds, and cliffs, appar- 

 ently without order, reaching to the sky in the blue distance. These 

 are the famous Bad-lands of the Little Missouri River. This peculiar 

 topography is the expression of the erosive forces on rocks, which are 

 nearly horizontal, and which, though mostly soft, havediff'erent degrees 

 of hardness and texture, in a region where the grade of the streams 

 is steep. There are no running streams here during most of the year, 

 but heavy rains and melting snows wash the soft bluffs ; the milky water 

 collects in streams and rushes downward to the Little Missouri River, 

 which has cut down four hundred feet or more into the plain so dis- 

 sected by the short side streams of the river that from some points of 

 view the whole region seems a chaos. 



On the north side of the railroad, after leaving Sully Springs, we see 

 bluffs, which are nearly continuous, but appear to recede and approach 

 as we pass along. Now they embrace bays of the more nearly level 

 country, and project plainward apparently forming capes, headlands, 

 and peninsulas. The disintegrating forces of the atmosphere, like the 

 waters of the sea, have in some places worn down the ridges, which 

 connect the promontories or buttes with the higher plateau, leaving 

 these hills isolated, like islands near the seashore. Though the pre- 

 vailing color is gray, some layers are darker, especially the seams of 



