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No. IV. 



Remarks on the Lead Mine Country on the Upper Mississippi. 

 [Addressed to the Editors of the New-York Mirror.] 



Gentlemen : 



Time admonishes me of my promise to furnish you some ac- 

 count of my journey from Galena to Fort Winnebago. But I 

 confess, that time has taken away none of those features which 

 make me regard it as a task. Other objects have occupied so 

 much of my thoughts, that the subject has lost some of its vivid- 

 ness, and I shall be obliged to confine myself more exclusively 

 to my notes than I had intended. This will be particularly true 

 in speaking of geological facts. Geographical features impress 

 themselves strongly on the mind. The shape of a mountain is 

 not easily forgotten, and its relation to contiguous waters and 

 woods is recollected after the lapse of many years. The suc- 

 cession of plains, streams, and settlements is likewise retained 

 in the memory, while the peculiar plains, the soils overlaying 

 them, and all the variety of their mineral and organic contents, 

 require to be perpetuated by specimens and by notes, which im- 

 pose neither a slight nor a momentary labor. 



Limited sketches of this kind are furthermore liable to be mis- 

 conceived. Prominent external objects can only be brought to 

 mind, and these often reveal but an imperfect notion of the per- 

 vading character of strata, and still less knowledge of their min- 

 eral contents. Haste takes away many opportunities of obser- 

 vation ; and scanty or inconvenient means of transporting hand 

 specimens, often deprive us of the requisite data. Indeed, I 

 should be loath to describe the few facts I am about to communi- 

 cate, had you not personally visited and examined the great car- 

 boniferous and sandstone formation on the Mississippi and Wis- 

 consin, and thus got the knowledge of their features. The pa- 

 rallelism which is apparent in these rocks, by the pinnacles which 

 have been left standing on high — the wasting effects of time in 

 scooping out valleys and filling up declivities — and the dark and 

 castle-looking character of the cherty limestone bluffs, as viewed 



