ilroad or from a steamboat on the river, this lofty
mural precipice with its huge weathered masses of upright columns of
bare rock, presenting a long, straight unbroken ridge overlooking the
beautiful Hudson River, is certainly extremely picturesque. Thousands
of travelers gaze at it daily without knowing what it is. This entire
ridge consists of no other rock than trap traversing the Triassic
formation in a huge vertical dike. The red sandstone formation of New
Jersey is intersected by numerous dikes of this kind, but this is much
the finest. The materials of this mountain have undoubtedly burst
through a great rent or fissure in the strata, overflowing while in a
melted or plastic condition the red sand-stone, not with the violence
of a volcano, for the adjoining strata are but little disturbed in
position, although often greatly altered by the heat, but forced up
very slowly and gradually, and probably under pressure. Subsequent
denudation has laid bare the part of the mountain now exposed along
the river. The rock is columnar basalt, sometimes called greenstone,
and is solid, not stratified like water-formed rocks, but cracked in
cooling and of a crystalline structure. Here is a remarkable but not
uncommon instance of a great geological blank. On the east side of
this river the formations belong to the first or oldest series of
Primary or Crystalline rocks, while on the west side they are
all Triassic, the intermediate Cambrian, Silurian, Devonian and
Carboniferous formations being wanting. This state of things continues
all along the Atlantic coast to Georgia, the Cretaceous or Jurassic
taking the place of the Triassic farther south.

* * *

Like thine, O, be my course--nor turned aside,
While listening to the soundings of a land,
That like the ocean call invites me to its strand.

_Mrs. Seba Smith._

* * *

"Montrose to Cornwall. This celebrated passage of the Hudson through
the Highlands, is a gorge nearly 20 miles long from 3 miles south of
Peekskill to Fishkill, and is worn out of the Laurentian rocks far
below mean tide water. The hills on its sides rise in some instances
as much as 1,800 feet, and in many places the walls are very
precipitous. The rock is gneiss, of a kind that is not easily
disintegrated or eroded, nor is there any evidence of any convulsive
movement. It is clearly a case of erosion, but not by the present
river, which has no fall, for tide water extends 100 mile