446 KANSAS CITY REVIEW OF SCIENCE. 
great variety of trees clothe these hillsides—oaks, hickory, walnut, ash, hack- 
berry, linn, maple and many others of smaller growth; and if you would see a 
living chromo, painted in all the gorgeous and unerring tints of nature, come here 
when the first frosts of autumn have colored their foliage with crimson and gold, 
blue, brown and purple, and you will see one of rare beauty and excellence. 
As one stands upon the top of these bluffs and looks down upon the great 
valley below, with the great river winding through it like a silver thread, he is lost 
in the contemplation of ‘the vast time it must have taken to carve out this great 
water course, hundreds of feet deep, through masses of rock, shale and clay. 
But to the observer of Nature’s methods the process is plain and simple. Stand 
here when the last snows of winter are melting off under the influence of a hot 
afternoon sun and you will find every atom of this hillside in motion. Thou- 
sands of tiny streams and rivulets loaded with sediment are hurrying downward, 
great cliffs are undermined and plunge down the slope, carrying with them tons 
of loose rock and earth. By this process and the thawing out of the frost the 
surface is left in a soft and spongy condition; then comes a sudden thunder 
shower with its torrents of water, sweeping all this loose material into the river to 
be scattered along on a thousand sand bars; to be triturated and ground up by 
the swift current, and finally swept out into the great ocean to build up new co 
tinents and new worlds. And when you remember that this work has been 
going on for ages and ages, as constant as the rising and setting of the sun, you 
can easily imagine how these great valleys have been scooped out and widened 
in the process of time. 
We stand now in the angle of what is called the great bend of the Missouri. 
This noble river heading far up in the mountains in the northwest, after a 
southeasterly course of nearly two thousand miles, here makes a sudden turn to 
the east. On either hand of us is the valley of the Missouri, with its bold head- 
lands stretching far away in the distance, in front to the south, is the broad valley 
of the Kansas. It is a place to attract the lover of the sublime and beautiful in 
Nature. But others have been here long ages before us. Around us in the 
shadow of these great trees are the mounds of the dead—‘‘traces of lost and for- 
gotten races.” These mounds are generally placed in groups of three. Some 
are mere heaps of earth over a few calcined human bones, while others have 
within them a square, walled chamber with an opening to the South in which the 
bodies were laid in regular order. One large mound, which the writer assisted 
in opening, contained only a single skeleton which had apparently been placed in 
a sitting position. It was that of a huge-limbed, low-browed savage, probably 
such an one as Gen. Mitchell describes in his ‘‘Three Expeditions in the Interi- 
or of Australia.” He says: ‘‘As I wasreconnoitering the ground for a camp, I 
observed a native on the opposite bank, and without being seen by him, I stood 
awhile to watch the movements of a savage man ‘at home.’ His hands were 
ready to seize, his teeth to eat, any living thing; his step, light and noiseless as 
that of a shadow, gave no intimation of his approach; his walk suggested the 
