Reviezv of Recent Geological Literature. 
REVIEW OF RECENT GEOLOGICAL 
LITERATURE. 
121 
Geography of Minnesota. By Christopher Webber Hall. Pages xii,. 
299; with 6 plates, and 163 figures in the text. Minneapolis. The 
H. W. Wilson Company. 1903. 
This little book seems well adapted for use in Minnesota schools 
and colleges, whether for recitations or as supplementary reading. It 
is written in a simple style, and has abundant illustrations from pho- 
tographs, with numerous maps, profiles, and sections, which must in- 
terest school children, and also older people, in the physical features of 
the state, and the causes that produced them. 
In thirty-six chapters, the contour of Minnesota, its weather condi- 
tions, former glaciation, natural water supplies, common and artesian 
wells, stream erosion, the present lakes and ancient glacial lakes, prai- 
ries, forests, hills and mountains, minerals and rocks, are concisely de- 
scribed and pictured. Many of the pictures are from the geological, 
botanical, and zoological surveys of this state. 
Another volume, on a similar plan, seems to be promised, as this 
book is called Volume I of "Geography and Geology of Minnesota." 
The present work treats only incidentally of the geology as explanatory 
of the geography, but thus deals somewhat fully with the glacial and 
modified drift, and with the sculpturing of the older rocks to their 
present topographic relief. w. u. 
Geology and Water Resources of the Snake River Plains of Idaho. By 
Israel C. Russell. Bulletin of the U. S. Geol. Survey, No. 199. 
Pages 192; with 25 plates, and 6 figures in the text. Washington, 
1902. 
The area here described consists mainly of lava, extending across 
southern Idaho, with a length of about 350 miles, and a width of 50 to 
75 miles. Its western part is about 3.000 feet above the sea, and it 
rises on an average about 10 feet per mile eastward. The Snake 
river, or Lewis fork of the Columbia, in flowing through this area, has 
vast water power, with numerous cataracts, of which the Twin falls, 
180 feet high, and Shoshone falls, 210 feet high, are the grandest. 
The dryness of the climate forbids agriculture excepting by irrigation, 
and the plains are chiefly utilized for stock raising. On each side rise 
rugged, sharply serrate mountains, varying from a few hundred feet 
to more than 6000 feet above the plains. The mountains, so far as 
known are of Paleozoic or older rocks, and are considered to have been 
uplifted mainly before the Mesozoic era. and to have been deeply 
eroded before the beginning of the Tertiary. 
On the site of this great valley plain or basin, now traversed by the 
Snake river, a lake existed during the Miocene period, whose sedi- 
ments named the Payette formation, "are mainly sands, clays, and vol- 
