EARLIER INVESTIGATIONS AND DEVELOPMENT OF DEPARTMENT. 5 
in action in the Salton and Pattie basins, which are filled with water at 
long and irregular intervals. 
The Salton Basin is an irregular oblong depression with an area of 
2,000 square miles, having its long axis lying northwest and southeast, 
extending from the angle formed by the San Jacinto Mountains and San 
Bernardino foothills, in California, to a point across the international 
boundary line between the United States and Mexico, being cut off from 
the Gulf of California by the alluvial deposits in the delta of the Colorado 
River. The lowest part of this depression is 287 feet below sea-level, and 
the presence of an old beach-line several feet above sea-level shows that 
comparatively recently it has been the site of a lake which emptied 
southwardly into the Gulf of California. Within historic times, however, 
the basin has been empty, and this great bowl is one of the marked features 
of the Colorado Desert. The rainfall is exceedingly scanty and the soil 
is highly charged with salts of various kinds; consequently the vegetation 
is of a pronounced spinose or halophytic type. 
Several times within the last century the flood-waters of the Rio 
Colorado have been diverted to such an extent as to flow into the basin 
and form a small lake, and the presence of several minor beach-lines on 
the slopes of the basin suggests that such inflows have taken place 
repeatedly within the last few thousand years, and also that the level of 
the ancient lake was not lowered uniformly. 
During the last three years faulty engineering operations opened 
a channel leading into the basin, and the result was that the main 
flow of the Colorado River ran into the depression and a lake with an 
area of 500 square miles was formed, accompanied, of course, by the 
entire destruction of the desert vegetation on this area. The commer- 
cial interests imperiled, together with the history of the previous inflows, 
leads to the belief that we may soon have available the spectacle of the 
drying up of this lake and the advance of the desert vegetation to reoc- 
cupy the areas left bare by the recession of the water. As a fortunate 
prelude or beginning of this study, Dr. D. T. MacDougal and Mr. Fred- 
erick V. Coville visited the basin in 1903 and made some observations 
upon the vegetation, together with some photographs of the manner of 
occurrence and habit of several of the more important native forms. 
The evaporation and seepage in the region are such that at least ten or 
twelve years will be necessary to empty the basin or reduce it to a mini- 
mum, which will thus afford experimental conditions on a large scale of 
the revegetation of a submerged area by xerophytic plants. 
The Pattie Basin, which is connected with the lower portion of the 
delta around the southern end of the Cucopa Mountains, also received 
some of the flood, and the body of water formed, the Laguna Maquata, 
has had a more nearly continuous existence, being entirely dried up only 
occasionally. It is, in fact, repeating the earlier history of the lake in 
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