55 
glorious with foliage, and flowers, and sweet perfume. The flower 
died, but in it grew up first a tiny pod, which swelled at last to a 
receptacle of peas like this—-like this, a common vegetable, yet, he 
trusted, no unworthy subject of a ten minutes’ lecture. 
MR. E. A. PANKHURST ON THE CANONS OF 
) THE COLORADO. 
At their Soirée last year Mr. Lomax illustrated the mean- 
ing of his statement, that the most useful lesson the micro- 
scope could teach them was to use their own eyes micro- 
scopically, by directing attention to the little channels which 
tiny streams dug, the sediment they carried along with them, 
and with which they half-filled up the tiny pool that marked 
the end of its course. That subject he now wanted to carry further. 
Magnify that stream a few thousand, perhaps million, times, and they 
had still the same forces at work, acting in precisely the same manner ; 
but now the channel of the ‘rivulet had become a huge ravine, and 
they had a vast torrent carrying on to the sea the dust and the débris 
of a range of mountains. From an imaginary sketch of such a reality 
he directed attention to an actual one suspended on the wall behind 
the platform. It represented the course of a river through a table 
land of Spain near Parrulena to the north-west of the Sierra Nevada, 
where for miles it flowed at the bottom of an abyss of hard rock, not 
rubbly chalk, which it had itself scooped out to the depth of two hun- 
dred feet or more. Lateral streams running into this chasm, or cafon, 
as it is termed, had cut down portions of its sides until hills had been 
thereby formed. But he wanted them, with the assistance of another 
diagram, to carry their imagination yet further. To the south of Salt 
Lake and the Mormon territory, in North America, lay a dreary series 
_of plateaux traversed by the Colorado river and its tributaries, which 
bore their burthen of waters into the Gulf of California. Though that 
_ region possessed many considerable streams, it was over large areas a 
kind of desolate wilderness ; for, instead of irrigating the ground, these 
_-- streams flowed in profound gorges, in some cases more than a mile in 
