` Cocxsurn-Hoop.—New Zealand a Post-glacial Centre of Creation. 11 
There has been no ice work going on there since the Colorado began to 
cut its mighty drain a mile and a quarter deep, where it is at the same 
time but one hundred and eighty feet across; the three hundred feet of the 
lowest portion of this extraordinary chasm being eroded through hard 
granite. When this great work commenced, according to reasonable 
caleulations, the northern currents must have been spreading drift on the 
submerged eastern plains, if that operation went on during the — 
period of Sir Charles Lyell. 
The moraines of ancient local glaciers may be seen on the slopes of 
these mountains below 39° N. latitude, and also upon those of the Sierra 
Nevada, still nearer to the tropics, but traces of general glaciation there or 
of northern drift on the shores of California of the same age as that on the 
eastern side of the Missouri have not hitherto been observed. The vast 
accumulations of shingle on the terraces of Oregon and Washington terri- 
tory are as ancient, according to American geologists, as those of the 
highest plateau of the prairies east of the Rocky Mountains, and are 
composed, as the latter are likewise, of materials of local derivation. They 
‘were deposited there when the Cascade Range already presented a formid- 
able wall, and previous to the time when Mount Hood, Mount Rainier, 
and Shasta, those grand ** Lookers-on'' of the Pacific Coast, were piled up. 
The boulders which lie on these old shingle terraces on the sides of the 
Willamette and other valleys, and on the shores of Vancouver, may be 
pointed to as memorials of the ** Great Age of Ice," but they cannot be 
proved to have travelled very far. The grey syenite of which the majority 
of them consist, is a distinguishing rock of the Cascade Range, from 
whence glaciers brought them down probably during a local period of cold. 
On the Atlantic side of the -Mississippi basin, erratics were 
dropped in certain meridians, as far south as the 87th degree of lati- 
tude, when the way was open over the great lake region then submerged 
to the polar sea, just as they are being now on the American side of the 
Atlantic, nearer to the tropic than they were at that era. 
Ice-polished and striated boulders, floated from afar in distant ages, 
may lie buried under the soil of the Californian plains, but none have been 
discovered by American observers. I could see no foreign stones or ancient 
ice-marks on the slopes of Calaveras or Mariposa, above Yosemite. 
There is a vast river in the Pacific coming from equatorial regions, 
entitled to be described in the same expressive language with which Maury 
introduces his readers to the consideration of the Gulf Stream. It sweeps 
near the coast of Japan past Yokohama, leaving the shores of Yesso further 
off than it does those of Nipon, and has flowed in the same course, temper- 
ing its climate and causing. hurricanes in its seas, we may conclude from 
