student. A consideration of some of them sometimes 
856 Buffalo and Chicago, or [ October, 
test this question, if somebody would plant an infant pine and 
oak together near a grown oak, and the same near a grown pine. 
There should be several of each plant to guard against accidents 
to either kind spoiling the comparison, and then observe their 
comparative progress a few years. Has anybody ever done this? 
Will somebody who has an opportunity please do so? 
A’ 
Vv 
BUFFALO AND CHICAGO, OR “ WHAT MIGHT HAVE 
BEEN.” 
BY PROFESSOR E. W. CLAYPOLE. 
Io great spectacle which Buffalo can show to the members 
of the association needs no description. Met as we are, 
almost within sound of the cataract, we are tempted to ask con- 
cerning it many questions, to answer which would not be easy. 
But to us who compose the Section of Geology, Niagara is a 
study of peculiar interest. The structure and age of its rocks, 
the formation of the great gorge and the various causes that have 
combined to produce it, all these topics have received careful con- 
sideration, and though our queries are far from being fully an- 
swered, yet the partial replies already extorted from nature are 
deeply interesting and strongly suggestive. 
Most of these points are, however, familiar to geologists, and I 
do not therefore propose to dwell upon them. They have already 
claimed and will again claim our attention. But there is one 
both curious and interesting, to which I wish to refer for a few 
minutes. 
In the study of history it is often both entertaining and eae 
tive to stop in one’s regular course, and dropping the thread 
the narrative of actual facts, to consider what might have been 
the course of events had certain great and critical occurrences 
not happened at all, or happened in a different manner OF under 
different conditions. These “might have beens B 
i e 
though of course impossible, are not necessarily useless to th 
shows US 
on how slender a thread have depended most momentous t? 
_ The delay of a few hours, the failure of an apparently gi 
ant coincidence would in many cases, so far as we can , na : 
1A paper read in abstract before the Geological section of the A. A. A. 5. # al 
of history, 
results. — 
