86 RESOURCES OF CALIFORNIA. 
§ 58. Santa Cruz Ruins.—Fifteen miles northeastward from 
the town of Santa Cruz are “The Ruins,” as they are ealled— 
forty and odd perpendicular cylinders of sandstone, from a foot 
to two fect in diameter, with holes from six to fourteen inches 
wide running through them. These cylinders were discovered 
in 1855, in a bed of sand, on the side of a sandstone mountain, 
and were at first supposed to be the remains of some work of 
human hands: whence their name of “The Ruins.” Much 
curiosity was excited by their discovery, and a number of men 
were employed to dig away the sand, so as to expose the foun- 
dation on which the cylinders stood. The excavation was car- 
ried down in one place to the depth of forty feet, and the base 
of the column was found to rest on the bed-rock sandstone. 
The surface of the rock was sloping and rough, and there was 
nothing to indicate the work of man. It is now supposed that 
the cylinders were deposited by mineral springs, although it is 
believed that no similar columus have been formed elsewhere, 
the elevations made by mineral springs being, with this excep- 
tion alone, shaped like hillocks or cones—never like cylinders. 
The theory of deposition by springs may be the best mode of 
explaining their existence, but it is not satisfactory: the cyl- 
inders rise perpendicularly, or nearly so, and are very little 
thicker at the base than at the top; some of them preserve the 
same thickness from bottom to top. The material of the shafts 
differs from that of the bed-rock by being coarser and darker. 
And besides, the texture appears in places to have a spiral 
form, as though it had been made of a thick paste, rolled up 
spirally into a cylinder, and then hardened into a solid; leav- 
ing, however, a plain trace of the manner in which it was 
made. And some pieces, which have been broken off, suggest 
such a mode of formation. 
§ 59. Mirage—Among the most remarkable scenes wit- 
nessed in California are the illusions of the mirage in the des- 
erts of the Colorado and the Great Basin. “All the phenomena 
of mirage,” says Professor W. P. Blake, “are exhibited on a 
grand scale upon the Colorado Desert. Mountain-ranges, so 
