belief. Mr. Powell tells us that in
his first expedition, eight years ago, and for three years after that,
he tried hard to find in the west the equivalents of the State epochs
and periods so well known as the basis of geological nomenclature, and
nearly all taken from the exposures in New York and other Eastern and
Southeastern States. It was not until this attempt was abandoned that he
began to make progress. He had to study the western regions by
themselves, and leave correspondences to the future. That was the
experience of all the workers in the west, and it brings plainly to view
the great fact, of which not all, even of our best known geologists, are
yet fully persuaded, that the geological record, though doubtless a
unit, is not uniform over the whole country. These shackles thrown off,
the geology of the west leaped up with a vigor which is astonishing. It
seemed to be pretty evident, from Prof. Huxley's lectures here, that he
had not before imagined what results had been obtained in America. This
is not surprising. Few foreigners are able to keep along with the work
performed in this country, where there is such a direful supposed lack
of workers! It is a fact that at present there is no part of the world
where the discoveries made in this science are of so general importance
as here. The Rocky mountains owe their name "to great and widely spread
aridity," the mountains being "scantily clothed with vegetation and the
indurated lithologic formations rarely masked with soils." But there are
many systems of uplifts in this region, and Mr. Powell distinguishes
three in the field covered by his report. They are the Park mountains
("the lofty mountains that stand as walls about the great parks of
Southern Wyoming, Colorado, and Northern New Mexico"); the Basin Range
system (named by Gilbert from the fact that many of them surround basins
that have no drainage to the sea); and the Plateau Province. It is worth
remarking that in the west the geologist precedes or accompanies the
topographer, and accordingly has an opportunity to name the regions
according to real peculiarities rather than chance suggestions. The
future map will be significant of the past history as well as of the
ocular features of the landscape. Mr. Powell gives careful sections of
the strata in the Plateau Province, where they are about 46,000 feet
thick. Few persons imagine the vast amount of work, exploration, and
comparison which such drawings embo