204 Bibliography. 
many facts of deep interest to some of ‘the sciences to which our work 
is devoted. Mr. Catlin, before he went.abroad, gave us a valuable pa- 
per on the Indian pipe quarry, (Vol. xxxvii1, p. 188,) and we were 
much interested, during our interviews with him in. New York, by the 
bold geological features, so vividly sketched on canvass by his pencil. 
We are now permitted to advert to only a single fact. Upon the 
upper waters of the Missouri there are vast regions bordering on the 
river, where the rain and snow floods have cut out of the high tertiary 
banks, the most extraordinary groups of cone-shaped and turreted 
hills, which are merely sections made by water, of a most extensive 
and soonest tertiary or recent secondary formation. 
ds of clay, sand, gravel, loam, lignite and gypsum, Ww which we 
well went: to have seen portrayed in lively and contrasted colors 
in Mr. Catlin’s oil paintings, are arranged with the most exact regular- 
ity, and. remain so perfectly horizontal, that_no convulsion can have 
ever disturbed them, since they dropped from the waters which, in 
gone by ages, laid them down where we find them now, in brilliant 
sheets of strata. The lignite had been taken for coal, and it is not at 
all surprising, since it resembles coal so strongly i in color and form. 
A vast country of many thousands of square miles lies in prairie, OF 
covered by pumice, and upon the unmutilated »surface presents little 
variety of structure; but, where it has been worn by the torrents that 
rush into the great river, the water has cut down these beautiful strat 
feet. ‘The forms are, in general, elegantly sym ; 
grass-clad from base to summit, or with the na he strata re and 
colored in beautiful and definite contrast. The cones stand side by 
side and base to base, with only winding passages among them. Jn 
various instances, they are cut into pillars or rr olumns, crowned by 
capitals, which are the remains of the upper § ta of firmer con- 
sistence—giving to these vast mounds a castel : 
