480 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



very distant horizon a peak looms up with special prominence, 

 and occasional patches of snow indicate that the mountain crests 

 lie well above the thirteen thousand and fourteen thousand foot 

 line, for below that line, and generally even above it, the linger- 

 ing winter snows rapidly depart before the summer's heat. The 

 two thousand feet advantage that we possess in the elevation of 

 this region over that of Mount Washington is in no way indicated 

 by the thermometer ; an almost subtropical sunshine warms up 

 the open expanse of the Rocky Mountain parks, and with it there 

 are but few reminders of the chilly blasts that habitually sweep 

 over the crests of the White Hills. 



Florissant has long been famous with geologists for the wealth 

 of insect remains which its rocks harbor. No other locality of 

 the earth's surface, not even the famous Oeningen beds of Switz- 

 erland, has disclosed an insect fauna of equal variety and abun- 

 dance, or with characters so well preserved as they are here. From 

 butterfly to beetle, wasp, dragon-fly, and ant, almost every type of 

 this great group of animals belonging to the period of the mak- 

 ing of the Florissant rock is represented in the soft and thinly 

 bedded shales which here and there force themselves through the 

 not over-luxuriant covering of sward. If, perhaps, the better spe- 

 cimens have by this time been culled by the ever-grasping geo- 

 logical collector, many yet remain, and with rapture the eye 

 follows the marks of hair and exquisite venation which have 

 withstood a time action of perhaps one hundred thousand to two 

 hundred thousand years. 



My own purpose in visiting the Florissant Basin during the 

 past summer was less for the study of its extinct animal remains 

 than for inspecting the debris of the wonderful forest which ages 

 ago had undergone its transmutation into stone, and now reads its 

 own history from monuments which are destined to live for equal 

 ages in the future. With me were a number of students, of both 

 sexes, who had determined to share the pleasures and discomforts 

 of camp travel, from canon to mountain peak, and to whom the 

 quasi-luxuriance of the big Rocky Mountain coach was in no way 

 an obstacle. A few hours' easy journey across the Hayden Divide 

 brought us from our quarters at Green Mountain Falls, on the 

 northern shoulder of Pike's Peak, to the land of ancient lake and 

 dead volcano, where, under the kindly guidance of the ranchero 

 and his amiable daughter, we were almost immediately put in 

 sympathetic touch with the relics of departed life. 



To the geological mind the Florissant Basin is an ancient silted 

 lake, the waters of which succumbed to that sure infiltration of 

 sediment which marks the beginning and end of nearly all stand- 

 ing bodies of continental waters. In this case, however, it was not 

 the deposition of sediment within the lake by inflowing streams 



