another valley, quite similar to that above, and known as the Uinta basin. In this basin it is joined by the Uinta and White Rivers. Traversing this basin, it gradually enters a cañon in stratified beds. These beds, and the surface of the country with them, incline at a very low angle towards the north, so that the stream, in its southern progress, is constantly getting deeper and deeper below the surface, until, in a distance of ninety-seven miles, the walls have risen to a height of 3300 feet above the river. At this point the walls break off abruptly, in a direction transverse to that of the river, leaving a small valley at the foot of the cliff. Lower down, the river commences immediately to run into a seċond cañon, of a character precisely similar, and ending in a similar manner, by an abrupt cliff. The length of this second cañon is thirty-six miles, and its height above the river, at the foot, is 2000 feet. A third similar cañon follows, of a length of sixty-two and a half miles and a maximum depth of 1300 feet, before the mouth of the Grand is reached. The upper of the cañons produced by these inclined steps has been named by Major Powell the Cañon of Desolation, and the cliffs at its foot, the Brown Cliffs. The second, Gray Cañon, and its cliffs, are known as the Book Cliffs or Book Mountains, of Captain Gunnison's narrative. The line of these cliffs extends in an easterly direction to the Grand, and borders the Grand in an almost unbroken line to the edge of the mountains. The third cañon bears the name of Labyrinth Cañon, and its terminating cliffs, the Orange Cliffs. Stillwater Cañon begins at the foot of the Orange cliffs, and extends below the junction of the Grand and the Green. The meeting of the waters takes place in the gloomy depths of this canon, 1300 feet below the upper surface. Following the Grand River up from the point of junction, we find its enclosing walls gradually lessening in height until they are scarcely more than bluffs in size. Then we approach the Sierra la Sal, which rears its bare summits 9,000 feet above us, and 13,000 feet above the sea. Here the monotony of plateau and cañon is broken. The enormous eruption of trachyte by which these mountains were formed has terribly upset the country for many miles around, and through the mass of ruins the great river is hard pressed to find a passage. Farther up, we find it alternately winding about tranquilly in open valleys, and rushing madly through cañons in the soft sandstones, until we reach the edge of the mountains. Here we leave it and return to the Colorado. A short distance above the junction of the Grand and the Green, the surface of the country begins to rise with a long, gentle slope, towards the summit of a fold. Stillwater and Cataract cañons are cut in this fold. The walls grow gradually higher, but before the river reaches the axis of the fold, it seems to become discouraged at the prospect of the difficulties ahead, and turning nearly at right angles, it runs, diagonally to the axis, and as gradually out of the fold, at the mouth of the Dirty Devil River. The axis of this fold must have a direction about northeast and southwest. There is here a bit of open valley, and then another cañon-Glen Cañon-succeeds. In this latter the river passes around the end of the fold which headed it off above. In the course of Glen Cañon the river crosses a monoclinal fold where the dip is slightly north of east. The greatest height of Glen Cañon is at its foot, at the mouth of the Paria, where it is 1600 feet. Again the river runs into cañons, as if afraid of the sunlight. There is here another inclined plateau sloping towards the north, and in it the river burrows deeper and deeper until, at the mouth of the Colorado Chiquito, it is 3800 feet below the surface. This is Marble Cañon. The river has turned towards the west, and at the foot of this cañon, or-for this is continuous with the Grand Cañon at the foot of this portion the general course of the river is west. At this point it is crossed by the Paria fold, in which the drop of the beds is to the east, thus suddenly increasing the height of the surface of the country and that of the walls. point of crossing the river the throw is about 1,800 feet. At the Farther down the river is met another fault, which in some places is preserved as a fold running across the river's course. This is an enormous one, with a throw of about 3,000 feet. The drop is here, as in the Paria fold, to the east. This is the Eastern Kaibab fault, and the plateau above it is known as the Kaibab (“mountain lying down") plateau. The cañon here gains its maximum depth, which is, more than 6000 feet. This is not in a single slope from the water; a large part of it is in one or two benches, which stand back one, two, or three miles from the edge of the lower cliffs. The great throw of the Paria fold has brought to the surface the underlying granite, and the lower cliffs of the Grand Cañon are of this rock. Crossing the Kaibab plateau towards the west twenty-five or thirty miles, we encounter a steep descent to the west. This marks the line of a fault, the Western Kaibab fault. This also, like the other, is in some places a fault, in others a fold. The throw ranges in amount from 500 to 2,000 feet. The deepest part of the Grand Cañon is now passed. Still going west, we pass over a flat couutry to another steep descent, this time of about 800 feet. This marks the line of the Toroweap fault. Twelve or fifteen miles further in the same direction, and we meet another and greater fault, with the throw in the same direction, and of 2000 to 3000 feet throw. This is called the Hurricane Ledge fault, and twenty-five or thirty miles beyond is still another, the Grand Wash fault. This is an enormous one, with a throw of 5,000 feet where it crosses the river. This brings the level of the country nearly down to that of the river; and thus ends the Grand Cañon. Thus we find its walls to rise in successive, abrupt steps from the east, the intervening plateau being nearly flat, until they reach a height above the river of more than 6,000 feet,-where the river cuts through the Kaibab plateau,—and then to descend in a similar manner to the level of the river at the mouth of the Grand Wash. Below the Grand Wash, a dry stream-bed which enters the Colorado from the north, the river turns south again, and enters the Black Cañon of Ives's report-a cañon which would be a remarkable feature were it not brought into such close juxtaposition with that briefly described above. Below it the river runs in narrow valleys and low cañons to its mouth. An examination of tables showing the slopes of the Green, Grand Colorado and Arkansas Rivers, illustrates the fact that the slopes of the streams of the plateau region are not materially different from those of the rivers of the plains. The profile of the Grand River is known from the work of Dr. Hayden; that of the Green and the Colorado from those of Major Powell and Lieut. Ives; that of the Arkansas is derived from Dr. Hayden and from other sources. HENRY GANNETT. CONCERNING ZEAL. III. F in any community of the old world, which especially prided gence among its people, we were to find a popular work of history in which the American Revolution was described as a Canadian insurrection, and General Washington as a Canadian hero, it would most likely make us skeptical as to depth and quality of the knowledge possessed by its people. Yet in the popular accounts of the Murid war in the Caucasus1 which circulated in this country and in England some fifteen or twenty years ago, we find accounts of Schamyl and his Circassians, thus identifying the great Murid chieftain with a people whose boundaries he never crossed, whose soldiers never fought under his banner, and who evinced from first to last not the slightest sympathy with the great struggle for Caucasian and Mohammedan independence in which he was engaged. Aliens alike in race and in religion from Schamyl and his people, the Circassians (or Tscherkesses) were stirred by none of the impulses that prevailed among their mountain neighbors to the east of them. They were themselves comparatively recent converts to Islam, and very imperfectly acquainted with their professed creed. Up to early in the eighteenth century the Circassians were Christians, first converted by the Genoese, though their Christianity coexisted with much ignorance and barbarism, and many survivals of their primitive Paganism. To the last, the Circassians never lost a superstitious reverence for the Christian shrines and ruined wayside crosses which line their mountains. And when they submitted to expulsion from these mountains by the Russians, almost without striking one manly blow for their creed and their country, and were transported to Turkish territory, it was found necessary to teach them the first principles, the commonest usages, and the commonest prayers of Islam. Their Mohammedanism, such as it was, was of the orthodox or Sonnee type; while the Shiya'ee sect, though not universal in the Eastern Caucasus, was that of Schamyl and of most of his subjects, and had been the creed of their fathers for seven or eight cen 1 Take for instance the popular work Schamyl and the Circassian War, by Mr. John Mackie, published in 1856 by Jewett of Boston, and very widely circulated at the time. turies. Under the influence of the Murid revival, the popular acquaintance with their creed and its laws among the tribes of the Eastern Caucasus was not behind that which existed in any quarter of the Mohammedan world. It was the bond which united them in spite of the widest differences of race, the natural isolation produced by intervening mountain ranges, and long traditions of separation. From the earliest historic times this mountain range has been peopled by "more than a hundred" tribes, whose variety still makes it a sort of ethnological and philological museum. It reminds one of a thorn-bush growing by a thoroughfare through which many flocks of sheep have passed; every flock has left a tuft of wool in its passage. Situated on the great highway of the nations, it has seen the hordes and tribes of Asia pouring into Europe for millenniums past. And its petty valleys of alluvial soil, at once productive and easy of cultivation, have attracted little colonies from every great migration to settle among its hills. In the time of Pliny, when Colchis was still the mart for commerce with the far East, one hundred and thirty languages were spoken in its market place. An Egyptian colony and a colony of Chinese from Assam vied in the cultivation of its rich but scanty soil, and nearly every race between the Nile and the Pacific were represented among its peoples. If the peoples we call Turanian or Hamitic, for convenience of classification, were in the majority, the nobler Aryan race was not absent, and the Iran or Ossetian race still represent "the children of light" in this great boundary between the "Iran" and the "Turan" of the Persians. This variety of race is confined chiefly to the Eastern Caucasus, for the passes of the western or Circassian part of the range lead down only to the shores of the Black Sea. And among this variegated population, zealous Shiya'ee missionaries of Persia had early proclaimed the faith of the Prophet, and had it brought to some sort of religious and political unity, though without interfering with the differences of language which separated its little districts. At the beginning of the present century, political unity had entirely disappeared. Every petty district had long been living under hereditary chieftains, who jealously preserved their independence, and waged endless wars upon each other and upon the plains. Freebooting was the usual profession of the people. They were diplomatically regarded as having formed a part of the Persian Empire, until the treaty of peace between that and the Russian Empire, in 1812, |