174 Revieivs — Sun Pictures of Rocky Mountain Bcenery. 



to 100 feet per mile. G-eneral G. M. Dodge, Engineer of the Union 

 Pacific Eailroad, has constructed a profile of the line, which well 

 illustrates this point. Thus : From Omaha to Columbus, ninety-one 

 miles to the west, we rise 488 feet, or more than five feet per mile. 

 At Cheyenne, 426 miles from Columbus, we are 4,617 feet higher, 

 having ascended a gradient of more than ten feet. In the succeeding 

 thirty- three miles further west we have an ascending gradient of 

 seventy feet to the mile. 



The entire country west of the Mississippi may be divided into 

 mountain and prairie. There are no large forests and very little 

 timber, save that which skirts the small streams. Cotton wood, a 

 few low oaks, with here and there an elm or ash, and belts of firs in 

 the higher regions, alone relieve the monotony of undulating ridges 

 and hills rising as far as the eye can see, like the waves of the sea after 

 a storm. This combination of mountain and prairie may be said to 

 comprise what is generally known as the Eocky Mountain region. 



In this charming series of pictures we have all the highest merits 

 of photography, and we also see how much more could be made of 

 some of these wondrous scenes, by the addition of a little colour. 

 Will the Sun ever be persuaded to paint his own pictures we wonder, 

 perhaps he may some day, who knows ? 



Taking the photographs as they come, we find they divide them- 

 selves readily into — firstly : twelve superb geological studies, un- 

 equalled, so far as we are aware, for their grandeur. They are, plate 

 ii., " Granite Rocks, Buford Station, Laramie Mountains." Here 

 the granite is seen to be parted by a series of vertical and transverse 

 joints, which, aided by weathering, has converted the mass into a 

 series of gigantic tors, like those of Dartmoor and Cornwall. Plate 

 iii., " Skull Eock (Granite) Sherman Station, Laramie Mountains," 

 is like a cairn of rounded granitic blocks, each one as big as a cottage, 

 suggesting the idea of some old giant's sepulchre. Plate v., " The 

 Dial Eocks, Eed Buttes, Laramie Plains," shows the eiFects of 

 atmospheric weathering on rock masses composed of beds of unequal 

 hardness, producing rock-columns, such as maybe seen on the beach 

 at Teignmouth ; in this case, however, the agents employed have 

 been the slow eating away of rain, frost, and wind. Plate ix. takes 

 us in memory to the Sinaitic Peninsula, with its long flat-topped hills, 

 its waterless valleys, bordered by eroded vertical cliffs with a vast 

 talus of disintegrated rocks beneath, desolate and drear in the ex- 

 treme. " Citadel Eock" and " Castle Eock," " Green Eiver Valley," 

 are magnificent outliers of rock, with perfectly horizontal bedding. 



The "Conglomerate Peaks of Echo," the "Sentinel Eock Echo 

 Canon," and the " Hanging Eocks, Echo City," deserve more than a 

 passing glance. Here we see beds of variegated sandstones and 

 conglomerates, like our own Devonian Pebble and Boulder-beds, 

 cemented together so compactly that frequently the softer under- 

 lying beds are weathered back, leaving the conglomerate to form 

 a vast overhanging rock, as at Echo City. 



Two striking photographs on the Weber Eiver exhibit views of 

 some remarkably weathered-out vertical beds of slaty limestones and 



