112 The West American Scientist. 
movement, but step by step, gaining one year and losing the 
next,but gradually through centuries extending the area of its ter- 
ritory until this extreme southerly and westerly outpost was 
reached. The same force which in its torrential fury carved the 
great cafions in the past, at times in milder moods, assisted by 
its distributing current to the extention of the territory of an in- 
significant form of animal life. So too with the colony found by 
Hemphill at Portland, Oregon. Follow the course of the Colum-_ 
bia on the map, trace its meanderings and note the remoter con- 
fluents that combine to make the greater stream and the extent 
of the drainage system and the area drained thereby. The same 
suggestion to the student of geographical distribution presents 
itself and affords a reasonable clue by means of which similar 
phenomena are explainable. 
Robert E. C. Stearns. 
U. S. National Museum. ) 
Washington, July 29, 1889. Jj 
BRIEFER ARTICLES, 
(From Demorest’s Monthly Magazine.) 
A MovinG LAKE oF IcE.—The Muir glacier,so named af- 
ter Professor John Muir, the noted geologist who has described 
it most satisfactorily, is the most wonderful of the glaciers in 
southeastern Alaska. It is forty miles long, and is moving at the 
rate of sixty feet a day through the basin of the mountains. The 
greater portion of this crystal river, about an eighth of a mile 
wide, is billowed into rounded hills and beetling precipices, quite 
resembling the sea ina storm; and at the centre it is splintered 
into turrets and pinnacles of amethist, turquoise and sapphire 
tinted ice with spires of dead-white crystal. All its surface is 
riven by countless crevasses, in the bottom of which streams of 
clear water find their way. These chasms are frightful gaps to 
anyone looking down between their walls. From this moving 
lake of ice, bearing rocks and long lines of detritus on its sur- 
face, vast masses break away as it emerges from a narrow gate- 
way of mountains into the open bay. These icebergs fall off from 
the huge glacier and dash into the waters, making navigation 
perilous to craft of all kinds, even when miles away. Among 
the detritus frozen amid the ice masses, are veins of porphyry, 
jasper, chalcedony, and quartz;and blocks of finest marble, gran- 
ite, and basalt are strewn upon the surface of the icebergs and 
the frozen lake in which they find their source. The traveler or 
explorer amid Arctic snews finds something appalling in the 
frozen wonders of our contradictory planet. 
THE SorGHuM INDUsTRY-—The results of ten years of ex- 
periment and investigation by the Agricultural Department at 
Washington on the cultivation and manufacture of sorghum and 
