544 HISTORY OF PASADENA. 



as a building stone. This brown sandstone layer is seen plainly imbedded 

 around the walls of Echo ampitheater, next below the layer of white feld- 

 spar mottled sj^enite rocks which form the north rim or crest at summit of 

 the ampitheater. And this marked contrast between the white syenite 

 rocks and the brown gneissic layer is traceable all through these mountains. 

 There are on Mount Wilson and Mount Lowe, and some other points, a lim- 

 itless supply of beautiful, fine-grained, bluish syenite — a kind of granite 

 most excellent for building stone, alike as to pressure resistance, weather 

 resistance, good working quality, and susceptibility of a fine polish. 



On Mount lyowe, and on the south-easterly facings of Mount Mark- 

 ham and San Gabriel Peak there are inexhaustible beds of decomposed feld- 

 spar or kaolin, from which the common table dishes or China ware of com-- 

 merce are manufactured : but all the specimens that I found showed such 

 admixture of iron oxide or other impurities as to vitiate their commercial 

 value. Some beds of a purer quality may possibly be discovered yet. 



HOW THESE MOUNTAINS WERE MADE. 



Some mountains are made by volcanic upheaval and outpour ; some bj^ 

 anticlinal or roof-like uplift of their whole series of stratified rocks ; some 

 by a great cataclysmal fracture and "fault," whereby the rocks on one side 

 of the fracture are tilted up, and the other side depressed or pushed under, 

 but the stratifications remaining more less intact ; and some are formed by 

 the crushing and mashing together of the rocks, which results from con- 

 traction of the earth's crust in its steady process of cooling. Our Pasadena 

 mountains partake of the last two methods. The mashing and crushing 

 process, or its results, are specially illustrated at several points ; but per- 

 haps more plain to be seen in Granite Cut, on the Great Incline Cable Rail- 

 road up Echo Mountain, than elsewhere. I examined this point particularly 

 on August 5, 1893; ^o^ from field notes made at the time I quote this 

 memorandum : 



" Found some ferro-micaceous sand rock and gneiss, frequently inter- 

 jected with dykes, seams, or pockets of pellucid quartz, white and pinkish 

 feldspar, and laminated mica ; also seams of metamorphic trap rock : and 

 numerous fractures infiltrated with breccia and sandwash from above. 

 Much of the formation is gneiss or gneissoid schist, passing into pulveru- 

 lent sand rock — the nearly completed disintegration of what miners and 

 water-tunnelers call "rotten granite." And there are gneiss laminations, 

 micaceous seams, and porphyritic dykes lying at all degrees of inclination 

 and all angles of intersection. The rock colors here are gra.y, brown, drab, 

 streaked, speckled, green, white, pinkish, tawney, slate, yellow. These 

 colors appear mostly in separate bodies, or in distinct seams, veins, or dykes; 

 but sometimes they all appear in a confused mass within a few square yards 

 of space. 



This mixed medley of formations is characteristic of the compression 

 or crushing process of mountain making. And the same process or method 

 is further illustrated and proven by the fact that the layers of different 



