REPORT OF TEE CHIEF ASTRONOMER 19 



SESSIONAL PAPER No. 25a 



to the European geographers if the Alps masqueraded under a dozen different 

 general titles dependent on the personal tastes of individual writers on those 

 mountains. 



It is well known that one of the first designations of the entire mountain 

 group lying between the Pacific and the Great Plains was due to Humboldt. 

 His 'Cordilleras of the Andes ' extended from Cape Horn to the mouth of the 

 Mackenzie river. Humboldt occasionally used the singular form ' Cordillera of 

 the Andes ' for the same concept. In view of the general restriction of the 

 term ' Andes ' to the mountains of South America, Whitney, in 1868, proposed 

 that the name ' Cordilleras,' with variants, ' Cordilleran System ' and ' Cordil- 

 h-ran Region,' be retained to designate the North American equivalent of the 

 Andes. This name was adopted in the United States census reports for 1870 and 

 1S80, and by a great number of expert geologists and geographers since 1868. 

 In process of time, however, the singular form, ' Cordillera ' and variants, 

 became used in the same sense. In one of these forms the Humboldt root word 

 with Whitney's definition has entered many atlases. It appears on numberless 

 pages of high-class Government reports, geographical, geological, and natural 

 history memoirs, and of such works as Baedeker's ' Guide-book to the United 

 States,' Stanford's ' Compendium of Geography,' etc. 



The time-honoured, erroneous, similarly inclusive name l Rocky Mountain,' 

 with variants, ' Rocky Mountain System,' ' Rocky Mountain Belt,' etc., has, 

 however, held the dominant place in the popular usage. Its inappropriateness 

 for the heavily wooded Canadian mountains west of the Front ranges is abun- 

 dantly evident. For the United States, Clarence King wrote a generation 

 ago: — ■ 



' The greatest looseness prevails in regard to the nomenclature of all 

 the general divisions of the western mountains. For the very system itself 

 there is as yet only a partial acceptance of that general name Cordilleras, 

 which Humboldt applied to the whole series of chains that border the 

 Pacific front of the two Americas. In current literature, geology being no 

 exception, there is an unfortunate tendency to apply the name Rocky moun- 

 tains to the system at large. So loose and meaningless a name is bad 

 enough when restricted to its legitimate region, the eastern bordering chain 

 of the system, but when spread westward over the Great Basin and the 

 Sierra Nevada, it is simply abominable."* 



The following table summarizes the above-mentioned variants along with 

 others more recently introduced, and still other general names now only of 

 historical interest. The names of prominent authorities and the leading dates 

 when they have published the respective titles are also entered in the table. 

 The authority for some of the older names is Whitney's work on the United 

 States, published in Boston, 1889. 



Mountains of the Bright Stones General use, end of eighteenth century. 



Shining Mountains Morse, Universal Geography, 1802. 



•U.S. Geoi. Exploration, 40th Parallel, Systematic Geology, 1878, p. 5. 

 25a— Vol. ii— 2£ 



