that it gave its name to this entire region,—the man who came to the Colorado mines being a "Pike'sPeaker," though his nearest lodes were situated a hundred miles from that mountain by the shortest

access.

A mountain which I admire more than Pike's Peak (or at least the Colorado City view of it), is the grand Cheyenne, which rises a little further south, and is plainly visible at the rear of the El Paso House, from base to dome. Its height is several thousand feet less than Pike's; but its contour is so noble and so massive that this disadvantage is overlooked. There is a unity of conception in it unsurpassed in any mountain I have seen. It is full of living power. In the declining daylight, its vast simple surface became the broadest mass of blue and purple shadow that ever lay on the easel of Nature.

Having refreshed ourselves with a good night's rest, in which fatigue met fleas and came off conqueror, we took an early start from the El Paso, to examine the natural features of this most interesting region.

Our first visit was paid to a shale-bed on the Fontaine qui Bouille, in which I had heard through Mr. Pierce of the discovery of interesting tertiary remains.

Mr. Garvin, a man of varied experience as sailor, hunter, miner, and merchant, who had finally settled down among the Rocky Mountains, and was conducting a Colorado City branch of George Tappan's house, accompanied us in our examination, and much assisted us by his knowledge of localities. We were joined by another gentleman of the same name, but no relationship with the former, (a singular coincidence in so small a directory!) a Dr. Garvin, whose

practice is probably more extensive than any physician's in the world,-bounded like a State, by the Arkansas on the south, the Platte on the north, the Rocky Mountains on the west, and some indefinite line on the Plains to the eastward. This is a case in

which a doctor must keep his horse.

How many calls

can be accomplished in a day by a medical man who has one case of high fever on the top of the snowrange, and a low typhoid patient on the Plains of the Arkansas, may be imagined by merely consulting the atlas. Still another gentleman joined our explora tions about the Fontaine qui Bouille-Mr. Sheldon, a resident engineer in Mr. Pierce's department, who shared his chief's enthusiasm for science, and had collected a small cabinet embracing some very valuable geological specimens.

The Fontaine qui Bouille (here pronounced "Fonten kee Boo'yeh ") is a, clear and rapid stream, about ten yards wide, and two feet deep, issuing from a cañon near the true base of Pike's Peak, and skirting the edge of the Colorado City settlement, with a southeasterly course towards the Arkansas. Half a mile below the El Paso House, it has been pressed into the service of a grist-mill by a rude dam of stakes and slabs. The little pond resulting from this arrangement gave us a nice opportunity to bathe. We were not slow to avail ourselves of it, and found the nearly snow-cold water the most delightful tonic we had enjoyed since our parching journey across the Plains. Having finished our bath with a cold shower below the dam, we dressed ourselves, and proceeded to work.

The mill, possibly owing to the fact that Colorado as yet buys most of her flour in sacks from the East,

was not in operation, and did not seem to have been for a considerable time previous. This fact facilitated our investigations, some of the most interesting excavations being in the bank near the water-wheel, and at the bottom of the stream beyond the sluice.

The bank was a perpendicular mass of shale interspersed with alluvial soil (the former predominating as we went deeper), about fifteen feet high, immediately below the mill, and running a number of rods without much change of elevation. Through this mass the long fibrous roots of young willow and cottonwood trees growing on the edge of the bluff, had penetrated and reticulated in all directions. The shale itself was almost purely argillaceous, and broke into cubes or scaled into lamina with equal ease. A more friable matrix, one apparently less favorable for the preservation of remains, could scarcely be imagined. Every geologist at the East knows in what low estimation the softer shales are regarded as a store-house for fossils, and how little reasonable hope there is of finding perfect specimens there, especially of the more delicate sorts. This shale was a more unlikely looking one than the brittlest of our Eastern strata. Yet, by the aid of a common jackknife, a hammer, and a shovel, we extracted from it a better preserved and more interesting collection of remains than I ever got from an equal area with thrice the labor. The great bulk of them belonged to a single species of tertiary oyster, resembling our modern mollusk in shape, but larger and heavier, with a beauty of color on its inner surface not surpassed by the mother-ofpearl shells which adorn East Indian cabinets. I was astonished to find the delicate arragonite lining as perfectly preserved and freshly iridescent as if the animal

had died an hour before. Not until the shells had been exposed to the air for several hours did the nacreous layer begin to scale off, and leave the coarser structure bare. Noticing this occur in some of the specimens, I gave the others a thin coating of glue which quite successfully arrested their further deteri

oration.

Patient digging in the shales was also rewarded by some fragments of an equally well kept ammonite. Though we succeeded in getting out no single perfect specimen, the remains were sufficiently complete to be characterized as Ammonites Jason. In Mr. Sheldon's collection we found several specimens of this mollusk much larger and handsomer, one nearly entire, obtained near the place where we were working. But the most interesting remains of this shale are the baculites. Several found here have measured eighteen inches in length, and exhibit a clearness in their curious markings, points, and iridescence so startling that one can hardly credit them to an obsolete period, and might almost be led into hunting the bed of the creek for contemporary specimens. On our return from the creek, we availed ourselves of the kindly proffered house where Mr. Garvin was keeping his bachelor menage entirely alone, and passed a couple of hours in sorting, varnishing, labeling, and packing the results of our investigation among both the conglomerates and agates of our past two days, and the shales of the Fontaine qui Bouille.

On the following day, the same party went two miles and a half up the Fontaine qui Bouille to visit the springs which gave it its name. The road along the bank of the stream from Colorado City is a pure impromptu affair to every fresh comer; but by skillful

driving, we managed to steer between boulders, and get the ambulance into the neighborhood of the springs, accompanied by several gentlemen on horseback.

The springs no doubt originally bubbled up from the bed of the river, but immense depositions of Glauber's-salts, or sulphates of lime and soda, have raised the principal fountains ten feet above the creek level, and they now rise in basins at the top of immense masses of this incrustation, standing perpendicularly out of the stream.

The Glauber's-salt taste of the waters is agreeably modified by a stream of carbonic acid, which jets up through the middle of the basin, keeping them constantly in a state of violent ebullition to the height of two or three inches. There are two of the main springs on the south side, and one on the north of the stream. The last is the most pungent. There are also along the base of the south bank, higher up, a number of small and comparatively quiet springs, one of which is an inky chalybeate, and the other a white sulphur. The alkali of the larger springs is evidently undersaturated with acid. We made as good lemonsoda water as I ever tasted, by filling in the liveliest part of the main spring, and corking up instantly a bottle, which we had previously charged with half a pint of lemon syrup and half a table-spoonful of tartaric acid. The water which we bottled without any mixture, and took back to the El Paso with us by way of experiment, resembled Congress water when opened an hour or two after, though lacking the saline flavor. The northern and more pungent spring somewhat reminded me of Vichy, and the chalybeate was rather like Pyrmont.