4 i4 HERMANN VON HELMHOLTZ 



yards, and a magnificent mountain range in the background, 

 with peaks 14,000 feet high which are really long snowy 

 ridges, up which one climbs by a cog-wheel railway, as we 

 propose doing to-morrow. . . . 



' Providence must have taken a holiday while the interior of 

 America was being made. Such a horrible squalid monotony, 

 and such unbroken monotony, as the journey between Chicago 

 and Denver never was seen. It is as flat as a table ; the first 

 part, endless stretches of maize fields, miles and miles of them, 

 always the same, enclosed here and there, alternating endlessly 

 with miles of dry stubble, where the wheat had been ; here and 

 there a log house with veranda, a few scanty trees, a few fowls, 

 or a wooden village, with a wooden lunch-room, or saloon, and 

 avenues and a hotel, more fit, however, for fowls than men ; 

 then a log city with great sheds for cattle and corn, waiting to 

 be carried away, and then more maize, more stubble, more lean 

 cows and black pigs, till on the evening of the first day we 

 reached the city of Burlington. There we went to bed in that 

 horrible Pullman Sleeping Car; I opened my window, which 

 let in dust as deep as my finger, but with it some air into my 

 compartment, and was waked by the damp smell in the night, 

 when we came to the Missouri, a great wide river shining in the 

 moonlight. The Mississippi was yellow and squalid as the 

 Vistula, but the evening sky with its gorgeous colours made up 

 for the weariness of the day. The courage of the men who 

 settle in these wildernesses whether fruitful or not is not to 

 the point impressed me enormously. One sees smart buggies 

 darting about in the neighbourhood of the so-called locations, 

 with female creatures driving them, and there is an occasional 

 child rarely, however; the men are all pale, and stoop, all 

 chewing something, all unspeakably repulsive, not the least like 

 our idea of rustics, only vulgar and weary, whether out of doors, 

 or in the cars, in the Exposition, or in the streets/ . . . 



' Glenwood Springs, Colorado, Sept. 6, 1893. 



' It was insane to make the Rocky Mountains, or Rockies, as 

 they are called, our object: instead of rushing to Newport, 

 we ought, like other reasonable people, to have gone to 

 Niagara, and thence to Chicago, and from there by the Yellow- 

 stone Park to the East; or straight through from Chicago to 

 San Francisco, and then back across the Rocky Mountains. 



