502 KANSAS CITY REVIEW OF SCIENCE, 
Dr. Hayes—Patrons’ Medal, 1867. 
Professor Nordenskjold—Founders’ Medal, 1869. 
Here we find four of the above five names, obtaining the Founders’ or first 
gold medal for their Arctic work, in precedence of distinguished explorers in other 
parts of the world. 
There can be only one of two conclusions that must be come to; either this 
Admiral must have said what he knew to be false, or the council of the Royal 
Geographical Society, probably as just and as competent a tribunal as is to be 
found in the world, has given its decision unjustly and foolishly to men of whom 
they had little personal knowledge—for Simpson and Rae had lived half their 
lives in the wilds of Hudson’s Bay, whilst Doctors Kane and Hayes were Ameri- 
cans. 
Here are two instances of direct untruths, told with a very paltry and mean 
object, by men holding the highest position in our navy, yet these very men, for- 
sooth, accuse the Eskimos of falsehood, cf surmise and assertion. J. RAE. 
THE OLD IN NEW MEXICO. 
SanTA Fe., N. M., Oct. 10, 1880. 
The trip to New Mexico, which, within the memory of very young men, 
was a three months’ toilsome journey from Kansas City, in ‘‘ prairie schooners ” 
drawn by diminutive mules or broad horned oxen, is now a matter of romance as 
one glides along over the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad, and gazes out 
of the windows of his Pullman car upon lovely prairies, well cultivated farms, 
herds of blooded cattle and sheep, and searches in vain for that zgnzs fatuus of 
of geographers, the Great American Desert. 
Without rehearsing the well known story of the attractions and advantages 
of Kansas, and the boundless mineral wealth of Colorado, we will at once take 
up that of New Mexico, which territory, as some writer has aptly said, ‘‘is 
entered through a hole in the ground,” meaning the tunnel through the Raton 
Mountains, at whose mouth runs the boundary line between Colorado and New 
Mexico. This tunnel is 2,000 feet long, through the hardest of granite, and is a 
fine specimen of engineering enterprise and success. 
From the tunnel we pass swiftly to the plains of New Mexico, and over an 
almost level road, we descend in clear view of the snow-clad Mexican Cordilleras in 
the distance, and the nearer foot-hills, often capped in fantastic shapes with 
pyramids, and cones, and abrupt steeps. 
We pass several Mexican hamlets, from which the ever-curious, tawny-faced 
women and children, dressed in bright colors or in plain black, look out from 
their abodes in huts upon the passing wonder. And it is indeed a wonder to see 
a long, full train of cars, with Pullman sleepers, traversing the ancient plains of 
the Pueblos, the realm of the Montezumas. About noon we cross miles of lava 
beds, whose black, broken masses cover the ground; and, at a distance to the 
west, we see the walls of a mighty mountain-crater, with the side open to the 
