The Humming Bird. -53 



STRANGE PHENOMENON in CALIFORNIA. 



FORMATION OF AN INLAND SFA. 



A geological phenomenon of considerable importance has 

 appeared in San Diego County, in the extreme south of 

 California. It consists in the almost sudden formation of an 

 inland sea. On Saturday a trickling of water was observed 

 to damp the ground around the Salton Salt Works, and now 

 it has expanded into a lake ten miles square, and from three 

 to eight feet deep. Then at Indian Wells, sixty miles south 

 of Salton, another new sea, forty miles square and from three 

 to five feet deep, has been formed. It appears possible that 

 these bodies of water may unite, and form a lake fifty miles 

 long and four hundred feet deep. Indian runners have been 

 employed to go round the rising waters, and as they have failed 

 to find any surface inlet, a boat has been provisioned for a week, 

 andstartedtoexploreand try todiscover the connection with the 

 Colorado River, whence the water is believed to come, whether 

 above ground or by a subterranean communication. The so- 

 called Colorado Desert, lying to the east of the new lake, 

 resembles the bed of a dead sea. It has an area of three 

 thousand miles, and lies two hundred and seventy feet below 

 the ocean level. Shells and other marine deposits abound. 

 Engineers have often planned to make this area fertile by 

 irrigation, after the manner of the Valley of the Nile, which 

 would add two million acres to the State, but all their efforts 

 so far have been in vain. The Southern Pacific Railway 

 crosses the Colorado River at several places 160 feet above 

 the ocean. For twelve miles near Yuma (Arizona City) only 

 a loose, water-sodden ridge, nine feet high and a mile wide, 

 separates the district from the Salton Sink. All the district 

 appears now to be reverting to the condition described in Indian 

 tradition. The stoppage of several artesian wells conflicts 

 with the theory of a subterranean ocean, having a current 

 running inland. 



