DIVISION EIGHT — SCIENCE. 545 



kinds of rock all through these mountains are not solid, but all checked and 

 cracked and seamed and fractured at every possible angle, and in every size 

 of blocks, from the fine breccia to the gigantic boulder. This condition, 

 existing as it does here deep in the rock beds, is due in part also to rapid 

 cooling after uplift, and to earthquake vibrations in connection with the 

 enormous compression. And this cracked or seamed condition explains in 

 part why these mountains form such a wonderful absorbent and store-house 

 for the water of the winter rains and snows, holding it like a mighty 

 sponge, and giving it out gradually during the dry season, by percolation 

 down to the springs, ooze places and tunnels in the innumerable canyons of 

 the range, or the lands below. It is furthermore the reason why large 

 storage dams cannot be used successfully here, as the water will seep away 

 through the cracks and crevices and fine seams in the rocks — and no large 

 artificial water storage can be relied on unless the bottom and sides of dam 

 or reservoir are solidly cemented. 



The fracture and " fault " process of contiguous uplift and depression is 

 illustrated b}^ the fact that all along the south face of these mountains the 

 layers of rock present a broken-off edge, and have a dip to the north, vary- 

 ing from 25 degrees of inclination up to a complete perpendicular. On the 

 other hand, the Pasadena geological basin is, in mj' opinion, depressed 

 toward the mountains, but having a south rim or lip along the line of the 

 South Pasadena bluff, the Raj-mond hill, Oak Knoll, Col. Mayberry's bluff, 

 the bluff north of the old B. D. Wilson ranch house, etc. From these and 

 many other correlated facts, I conclude that the line of peripheral shrink- 

 age-pressure was from the ocean side, with a line of resistance on the north 

 caused by the previous uplift of the Sierra Nevada mountains, and of the 

 great plateaus which now form the Mohave desert at an altitude higher 

 than our Pasadena mountain tops. These older elevations had become a 

 rigid continental mass, immovable, and the cretaceous or pre-tertiar}^ ocean 

 washed their foot-hills and beachy slopes. But the great round earth's peri- 

 pheral shrinkage from cooling continued to produce outer wrinkles analogous 

 to what we observe in a shriveling apple, and the California coast range be- 

 gan to bulge up out of the water by sheer necessity of crush-force displace- 

 ment, till at last there was a mighty break, a crash, a slip, whereby Mount 

 Wilson, Echo Mountain, and the rest, reared their heads up backward 

 toward the north, with a fracture face looking south, while the layers of 

 rock south of the line of fracture went under, making a depression or basin 

 more than a thousand feet deep — yet with another fracture line and lesser 

 uplift at Raymond Hill and its east and west range of co-ordinate bluffs. 

 This great geological gulf extended from the Arroyo Seco eastward in- 

 definitely ; but the Pasadena portion of it probably had an eastern barrier 

 reef or ridge on the east side of the present out wash of Eaton canyon, and 

 the basin has been entirely filled up with boulders, breccia, sand, gravel, 

 soil and vegetable debris from the mountains — of course, filling highest 

 near the foot of the mountains. And I think there was a lateral moraine 

 or crowded up wall of boulders on the line of the Marengo Avenue ridge, 

 from about where the Santa Fe railroad crosses it, down in almost a straight 

 line southward to the adobe flat where the Raymond station is located. And 

 a similar moraine in part formed the Orange Grove Avenue ridge. None of 

 this work was done suddenly, except in spots ; it was rather the slow, steady 

 process of unreckoned ages of time — for the pendulum of the geological 



35 



