290 KANSAS CITY REVIEW OF SCIENCE. 
Thule in science. Still, we should not utter the words ignoramus et ignoramibus 
as a wail of despair. To all they should be the sweet voice of hope. Fresh, 
buoyant, vigorous science should feel that it is on a pleasant journey, whose 
destination may remain unknown, but every mile of whose progress unfolds new 
vistas of beauty and variety in nature, each transcending its predecessors. 
THE MISSOURI RIVER MOUNDS, CONSIDERED FROM A 
GEOLOGICAL STANDPOINT. 
JUDGE E. P. WEST. 
Read before Section H, Friday, August i8th. 
In treating of the Missouri River mounds and mound-builders, I shall con- 
fine myself, mainly, to my personal observations, made in the fall of 1881 and 
summer of 1882, during an exploration of the river banks between Omaha and 
.St. Louis. The ^expedition was undertaken for the Kansas City Times, and an 
account of it was published in that paper in a series of nine articles pending the 
work. 
This paper will be confined, in a great measure, to the age of the mounds as 
indicated by the geological formations with which they stand invariably asso- 
ciated. In extent, these monuments of the past ages, in one unbroken chain, 
form conspicuous land-marks, crowning the river-bluffs from Omaha, Neb., to 
St. Louis, Mo., and, as the writer believes, upwards on the Missouri River and 
and upward and downward on the Mississippi River, and on their respective 
tributaries on both sides, co-extensive with the Loess and Terrace formations 
bordering them. They are found on the highest loess bluffs overlooking the 
streams, and on the old terraces of the Champlain era near them, and nowhere 
-else; without exception, they are associated with these geological formations and 
none other. 
But this fact would be without significance were it not for other facts with 
•which it stands connected. The Loess hills are still standing in graceful sequence 
along the rivers, and the Terraces form broad and picturesque steps in the valleys, 
and have stood so for long ages inviting, as they are still inviting, man's restless 
energy to erect his monuments upon them. Cities, towns, villages, and beautiful 
•country homes, are now continually springing into being upon them at the touch of 
modern civilization ; but history records the age of this work, and we speak of it 
in our daily intercourse. Not so with the other monuments I have alluded to. 
We question history about them, but it is silent. We question the seers and 
wise men of the aborigines of the continent, but they, too, and their traditions, 
are silent; they can give us no farther account of them than, that ''they were 
there in the time of our fathers;" and their traditions can say no more. They 
are older than history, they are older than tradition; and in the absence of both 
history and tradition how can we approximate their age. The builders have 
Jong reposed in the silence of death, and their stage of action is buried in the 
