204 Bibliography. 



many facts of deep interest to some of the sciences to which our work 

 is devoted. Mr. Catlin, before he went abroad, gave us a valuable pa- 

 per on the Indian pipe quarry, (Vol. xxxviii, p. 138,) and we were 

 much interested, during our interviews with him in New York, by the 

 bold geological features, so vividly sketched on canvass by his pencil. 

 We are now permitted to advert to only a single fact. Upon the 

 upper waters of the Missouri there are vast regions bordering on the 

 river, where the rain and snow floods have cut out of the high tertiary 

 banks, the most extraordinary groups of cone-shaped and turreted 

 hills, which are merely sections made by water, of a most extensive 

 and beautiful tertiary or recent secondary formation. 



The beds of clay, sand, gravel, loam, lignite and gypsum, which we 

 well remember to have seen portrayed in lively and contrasted colors 

 in Mr. Catlin's oil paintings, are arranged with the most exact regular- 

 ity, and remain so perfectly horizontal, that no convulsion can have 

 ev^er disturbed them, since they dropped from the waters which, in 

 gone by ages, laid them down where we find them now, in brilliant 

 sheets of strata. The lignite had been taken for coal, and it is not at 

 all surprising, since it resembles coal so strongly in color and form. 

 A vast country of many thousands of square miles lies in prairie, or 

 covered by pumice, and upon the unmutilated surface presents little 

 variety of structure ; but, where it has been worn by the torrents that 

 rush into the great river, the water has cut down these beautiful strata 

 so as to form innumerable gorges and ravines, from the summit grass 

 to the river's level, in altitudes varying between two and six hundred 

 feet. The forms are, in general, elegantly symmetrical cones, either 

 grass-clad from base to summit, or with the naked strata striped and 

 colored in beautiful and definite contrast. The cones stand side by 

 side and base to base, with only winding passages among them. In 

 various instances, they are cut into pillars or columns, crowned by 

 capitals, which are the remains of the upper strata of firmer con- 

 sistence — giving to these vast mounds a castellated aspect ; or, the 

 tough tenacious clays are carved into sharp pointed minarets, like the 

 aiguilles of the Alps, and they are grouped in such profusion, and often 

 at the foot of the castellated pyramids and cones, that the entire 

 assemblage rivets the eye as upon magnificent ruins of art, which, 

 however, they entirely surpass in colossal dimensions, and exuberance 

 of natural ornament. 



From Mr. Nicollet, the accomplished scientific traveller of the west, 

 we may expect some notices of the fossil contents of these extraordi- 

 nary strata, which, from what little we have already seen, must be 

 rich in fossils of the tertiary and the chalk.* Mr. Catlin favored us with 



* Dr. S. G. Morton of Philadelphia, has already published a notice of the cre- 

 taceous fossils collected by Mr. Nicollet. (Vide this No. p. 149.) 



