K^lSrS^S CITY 



Review of Science and Industry, 



A MONTHLY RECORD OF PROGRESS IN 



SCIENCE, MECHANIC ARTS AND LITERATURE. 



VOL. V. FEBRUARY, 1882. NO. 10, 



GEOGRAPHY. 



EXPLORATIONS IN IDAHO AND MONTANA. 



BY PROF. E. L. BERTHOUD. 



In 1878 I made an extended exploration of the Territories of Idaho and 

 Montana. This included not only the instrumental part of a thorough railway 

 survey, but also a critical examination of the natural and artificial productions of 

 that region embraced between British America, on the north, and Ogden, Utah, 

 on the south, and from the head of the Yellowstone River on the east to the val- 

 ley of Hell Gate and Wisdom River on the west, a region we found replete with 

 the most interesting natural scenery and the most striking objects that it has ever 

 been our fortune to witness. 



Without undue egotism, I really believe that our varied, rare and beautiful 

 scenery, for a full exhibition of all the abnormal phenomena of fire, air and water, 

 this portion of our republic, exceeds any similar extent in any other region under 

 the sun. Montana Territory is a land full of wonders, and, with Idaho Territory, 

 they seem to form an area of surface where the former energies, so potently exert- 

 ed in past geological ages, have not yet found a rest. The cosmographers and 

 philosophers of the Middle Ages were wont to ascribe many phenomena, many 

 geognostic facts, to the "plastic effects of Nature," as if the earth had in itself 

 some free-agency power to control its phenomena. Were this so, they could 



V— 37 



