no small

no small skill to manage our times for getting | often a matter of speculation with me, when up and going to bed satisfactorily, so as to we lay down at ten o'clock, as to how we create privacy where there was no mate- should grapple with any of these wild crearial for it. Then came breakfast. Tin Lee tures, if they should take a notion to try and made delicious "flappee jacks," as he called get out of their holes during the night. But them, and all the young folks were "de- I am thankful to say that, discouraged no voted" to them. And to keep account of doubt by our superincumbent weight, none of whose turn it was to have one, and of the them ever did so. Finally, all the merry amount of honey, or jam, or molasses that could singing party had to be coaxed, or scolded, be allowed to each, was a wonderful grapple. or inveigled into bed, which was Next came the packing up for our start. grapple, as any mother will know. Besides First, the bedding of each one had to be rolled all this, there was our “wash to be attended up into as complete a bundle as possible, and to, for, be as economical as we would, still securely strapped, for the horses' backs; and handkerchiefs and towels would get soiled, to collect all the multitudinous wrappings, and and even camping out did not render us ensuperintend the rolling them up, required more tirely indifferent to cleanliness. I, as the vigilance and energy than any one could oldest member of the party, had to keep up a think who has not tried it. Then the young continual grapple with wet feet, cuts, bruises, people had to be marshalled, and their shawls sunburn, etc., until sometimes I felt as if life and overcoats and waterproofs tied on to the was all one long grapple. Reading or medibacks of their saddles, and all the contingen- tating is pretty much out of the question in a cies of weather-hot and cold, wet and dry- trip like this, and for this reason it is an into be provided for; for after our pack train, valuable remedy for overtasked brains and with our baggage, once started in the morn- nerves. I felt as if we were all a party of ing,. we never saw it again till we went into cabbage-heads struggling for existence under camp at night. Then the lunch for our whole most unfavorable circumstances. party had to be provided and packed; and afterwards followed the grapples of the day's journey, the finding the trail, and the grap pling with the rocks and roots and stumps and swamps over which it generally pursued its course; the fording of streams, the climbing of mountains, the crossing of gullies, the going down the steepest of hill sides, all in a continuous succession, one after another. And to make matters worse for those of us who occupied the wagon, the trails often led along the sides of hills, and being simply "natural roads," i. e., not graded in the least, they, of course, slanted sideways, and kept us continually jumping from one side of the wagon to the other to make it balance, and keep it from toppling over. Then, as noon drew near, and cries for lunch began to come from our hungry equestrians, there was the necessity of finding out a pleasant lunching place, where shade and water could be secured. After this would come the grapples of the afternoon journey; and as evening drew on there would be the search for a good camping place, combining grass for our horses, wood for our fires, and water to drink for both man and beast. And lastly came the grapple for our night arrangements. A soft spot would have to be found for our sleeping, sheltered from the wind if possible, and then I would dig the small holes I spoke of, which so largely added to our comfort. All this had to be done, regardless of the holes and humps of all sorts and sizes, evidently the homes of wild creatures of various kinds, on the top of which our beds had to be spread. It was

The day we left the Mammoth Hot Springs we had an accumulation of all the miseries of camping-out life. Fierce heat, succeeded by torrents of wind and rain, and, to add to everything else, perfect swarms of mosquitoes! But we were repaid by the sight of Tower Creek, which rises in the high divide between the valleys of the Missouri and Yellowstone, and flows for ten miles through a cavern so deep and gloomy that it is called the Devil's Gorge. About two hundred yards before entering the Yellowstone River, it dashes over an abrupt descent of 156 feet, forming a very beautiful waterfall. All around are columns of volcanic breccia, some resembling towers, some the spires of churches, and some are almost as slender and graceful as the minarets of a mosque. But, alas, one sad fatality spoiled the scene for me. It was impossible to take the wagon any further, and there was no alternative but to mount one of those wild beasts named by Adam a horse. The guides picked me out a sober old creature named Foxey, used to carry a pack, and likely therefore to be equal to my weight, and unlikely to be frisky or foolish. On the morning of the 9th of August we started, a long train of twenty-six horses, two dogs, and three colts, for the Yellowstone Falls and Canon. As I was quite determined never to go out of a walk, on account of the tendency to slip off, I took the tail end of the pack train, and plodded on very contentedly for awhile. But, alas, my comfort was of short duration, for, when we stopped to lunch, Foxey lost sight of the pack, to which he felt he rightfully

and canon.

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One of our chief difficulties arose from the impurity of the water and its iupregnation. with mineral substances, yet the whole of our party went through the trip without suffering any bad effects, and even grew stronger and better, though not a drop of any stimulant was touched by any of us. The Yellowstone Lake lies 7,780 feet above the sea, almost on the top of the Rocky Mountains, and covers 300 square miles, being the fourth in size which lies entirely within the limits of the United States. Its pure, cold waters, in some places 300 feet deep, are the rich blue color of the open sea, and swarm with trout, while it is the summer home of white swan, pelicans, geese, snipe, ducks, cranes, etc., and its shores furnish feeding grounds for elk, antelope, black and white tailed deer, bears, and moun

belonged, and getting either bewildered or | Yellowstone Canon! Near us was camped a angry he began to behave in the most unac-photographer, and of course we were taken, countable manner. He backed and forwarded guides, pack-train, colts, dogs and all. They and sidled and turned round and round and put me, mounted on Foxey, in the very foreneighed, and completely mastered me, till one front of the picture, and beside me an old of the guides came up and fastened a rope to blind pack-horse with our store on his back, his bridle and led him the rest of the way. choosing this position for us, no doubt, because It is beyond my power to depict the grandeur we were the two querest looking objects in and beauty of the mystic river, and its falls the whole train. We have since heard that There are two falls, half a mile this picture is to be put in a panorama apart; the upper is 140 feet high, and the amongst other objects of interest in the Park, lower 397. The water is compressed into a and that we shall be magnified to the size of mass about 100 feet wide, and from four to fifteen feet and perfectly recognizable! six feet deep, and falls over the precipices in one apparently solid mass of glorious emerald, into its marvelous canon below. This canon is one of the Park's greatest wonders. It is a stupendous chasm about twenty-five miles long and from 1,000 to 3,000 feet high. It can only be seen from the top, as its sides are inaccessible except in one place six miles below the falls. The river has cut its way through a material largely composed of soft clays, sand, tufa, volcanic ash and breccia, with occasional layers of basalt, and has wrought out for itself a wonderful channel. Towers and turrets and dykes and castle walls of all shapes and sizes are crowded together throughout its whole length in wild confusion. Here and there a single tower stands out in solitary grandeur, isolated from all its fellows, with perhaps a lonely fish-tain sheep. Scattered along its shores are hawk's nest on its top, and little birds stretch- many clusters of hot springs and small geysers. ing out their open mouths towards the mother, It is surrounded on every side but one with who was circling in the grand and awful snowy mountains, and was long considered to chasm over the river. But wonderful as be entirely mountain-locked and inaccessible. these walls are for their height, and the gro- The guides told us that it was literally true tesque and beautiful forms into which they are that a man could stand at one point on the eroded, they are vastly more so for their color. shore of the lake and catch fish on one side From their lofty tops to the very edge of the of him, which he could swing over and cook water they are dyed with an endless variety in a boiling spring on the other side! Leav of the most vivid and delicate coloring.ing these high elevations, we went to see the They are a mass of yellows and red and coalblack and snow-white and cream and buff and brown and gray and olive, mingled together in richest confusion, while at the bottom runs the river, a glorious roaring torrent of purest emerald green, embroidered with silvery foam, between slopes decorated with velvet grass. The effect is indescribable. The lads of our party found great delight in starting enormous fallen trees down the awful incline, and watching them crash their way with a fearful swiftness to the river's brink. Any mother will know how that made me feel, especially when I add that no doctor could be procured in that region under seven days at the very least, and that we had neither houses nor beds, nor anything considered necessary in sickness. I confess I was thankful every minute that our family did not possess a country seat on the banks of the

Upper and Lower Geyser Basins. We had dismounted and unloaded our horses and buggy, and were looking for the best sites for our tents, when the cry was heard, "There goes a geyser!" and we dropped everything and ran. The sight was truly a glorious one. At the far end of the basin, Old Faithful was playing his wonderful fountain, and we saw what looked to us a river of water shooting up into the sky. Our guides told us it was only 150 or 200 feet high, but to us it seemed to reach the clouds, and on one side of it was a lovely soft rainbow that came and went with the blowing spray. It spouted for five or ten minutes and then subsided. Old Faithful is the only geyser whose performances can be depended upon. He spouts regularly every sixty-seven minutes, and has done so ever since the discovery of the Park. The crater looks like a great mound of coral

or petrified sponge, surrounded by terraced basins of all shapes and sizes, and of the most lovely colors. The whole mound is convoluted in the most beautiful fashion, and every one of the little basins around it is rimmed with exquisite scalloping and fluting. The Grand Geyser, the Giant, the Grotto, the Splendid, the Riverside, and the Fan, complete the list of large geysers in this basin, and each one has a marvelous and distinct beauty.

As we were quietly sitting in camp the day after our arrival, I noticed a great steam in the direction of the Grand Geyser, and called out to one of our guides, "George, is old Grand doing anything?" He looked a moment, and then, dropping everything, began to run, shouting out at the top of his voice, "Old Grand is spouting! Old Grand is spouting!" In a second of time our camp was deserted, every thing was left in wild confusion, and we were all running at the top of our speed to see the display. It was perfectly glorious! As it sent up its grand waterrockets 250 feet into the air, shooting out on every side, we all involuntarily shouted and clapped our hands, and Sam took off his hat and swung it over his head in a perfect enthusiasm of delight! It was like a grand oration, and a wonderful poem, and a beautiful picture, and a marvelous statue, and a splendid display of fireworks, and everything | else grand and lovely combined in one. Then all would subside, and the pool would be quiet for a moment or two; then again it would heave and swell, and, the glorious fountain would suddenly burst up again into the blue sky! Seven times this took place, and then all the water was sucked down, down, down into the abyss, and we climbed part way into the steaming crater, and picked up specimens from the very spot where just before had been this mighty fountain. The Giant, too, gave us a grand performance while we were in the Basin. We thought it the grandest and most beautiful of all. It shoots up a column of water at least seven feet thick to the height of 250 feet, the steam rising far higher. It played for nearly an hour, and flooded the whole basin around with boiling water, doubling the volume of water in the river. The internal rumblings and roarings meanwhile were per'ectly deaening. I could not help feeling as I gazed on these wonders that there was a lesson in it all. Nothing but heat could bring forth such beauty as we see here at every step, and I thought that thus also did the refining fire of God bring forth in our characters forms and colors as beautiful after their fashion as these. On the 19th we broke camp and started for our homeward journey. And so,

On the bank of the Nile, in the city of Cairo, is the Boulaq Museum. There, in the linen wrappings in which it was swathed more than thirty centuries ago, and resting with a row of other mummied kings on the concrete floor, the traveler will be pointed to the body of the great Rameses, who built the rockhewn temple of Abu Simbel, and carried Egyptian arms almost to the banks of the Euphrates. Whether or not he was the Pharaoh of the Israelite Oppression has long been a mooted question among scholars, questions of chronology being proverbially difficult to settle. The explorations now going on under the direction of an English society, the Egypt Exploration Fund, may be regarded as finally settling the question and proving that it was this most famous of the Egyptian kings, knew not Joseph, who built Rameses and Pithom with the enforced labor of his Hebrew slaves, and who commanded that the male children should be put to death.

On this subject there has been a great deal of question, although, since the discussion by Lepsius, thirty years ago, the opinion has been growing that the king who built Pithom and Rameses by the enforced labor of his Hebrew slaves must have been the second Rameses. The latter city, it seemed probable must have got its name from the king who built it. But this conclusion, though adopted in their histories by Maspero, Lenormant, Duncker, and Rawlinson, and supported inferentially by Manetho and the Rabbinic tradition, has not been universally accepted, and is opposed, for example, in Smith's Bible Dictionary, which puts the Pharaoh of the Oppression some centuries earlier than the fourteenth century B. C., in which occurred the accession of Rameses II.

M. Naville, who has charge of the work of the Egypt Exploration Fund, found in the Boulaq Museum two sphinxes, fragments of a temple, and a statue of Rameses II between two gods which had come from a ruin called Tell-el-Maschuta, down in the Delta. noticed the fact that in the accompanying inscriptions Rameses is every where spoken of as the "friend of Tum," the god of Ón. The

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of large water masses is due, as is familiarly known, to the attractive influence of the moon, and in a less degree to that of the sun. The moon attracts the part of the earth nearest to it with a greater force than it attracts the mass of the earth. As a consequence water flows in to the part of the surface nearest the moon, making high tide. When a land surface is turned towards the moon, if it consisted of a thin solid crust covering a fluid mass, it would rise in a tidal wave in precisely the same manner that the ocean does. Geologists have attempted the problem of determining what thickness must be given to the crust to make it rigid enough to endure the attraction of the moon without yielding thereto. The result of their computations is that a thickness of at least fifteen hundred miles is necessary.

Another objection to the assumption that the earth's interior is liquid is based upon the influence on the part within that must | be exerted by the pressure of the mass above. It has been found that as pressure is increased, the temperature of melting also increases, so that a degree of heat in the interior that would melt an uncompressed body would not change the state of one that was subjected to great pressure.

earth, but merely shows, what no one is disposed to deny, that the inner portions are very hot.

The doctrine that the earth is a melted mass with a thin solid covering, originated and found its main justification in the phenomena of volcanic eruptions. The geologists that have made the most thorough and complete study of these phenomena are among the foremost of those that have abandoned the ancient hypothesis. In the first place, although there is a considerable number of volcanoes, and some of them are of great activity, as shown by their violent explosions and by the outflow of large lava streams; yet in comparison with the mass of the earth, volcanic outpourings are so slight as to be entirely inadequate to afford a vent for the mighty disturbances that would rend a seething white-hot globe nearly eight thousand miles in diameter. In the next place, the lava that flows from volcanoes is not, when cooled, of greater specific gravity than the surrounding rocks that have long been in a solid condition. But in its melted state, (as lava expands in melting) its specific gravity would be less; so that if there were an uninterrupted layer of liquid material under the solid crust, the latter being of greater specific weight would inevitably sink, and leave the melted lava forming the entire surface. In considering this subject we are liable to be misled by a familiar analogy. We see large water masses covered in winter by a thin coating of ice, and that covering, although so slight in comparison with the mass beneath, possesses a high degree of rigidity. If we imagine an intelligent reasoning being, who had never seen such a frozen lake, taken to its surface, and not supplied with any means of cutting or boring into the ice, we would not be surprised at his assumption that it was solid throughout. But ice possesses the peculiar property of contracting as it melts, so that the resulting liquid is of greater specific weight than ice and forms a base of support as secure as a foundation of stone. Almost every solid except ice expands as it melts, so that the unmelted portion sinks to the bottom of the liquid.

A fundamental argument in behalf of the old hypothesis is drawn from the fact that as we descend below the earth's surface there is always an increase of temperature, and in most cases, the greater the depth the higher the temperature. It is argued that if this increase be uniform, there will be a temperature at the distance of about fifty miles at which all substances known on the earth's surface would be liquefied. Yet this argument is much less effective than it seems at a first glance. The deepest excavation extends only half a mile downward, and the deepest boring, that of Sperenberg in Prussia, reaches but three-fourths of a mile below the surface, or about one five-thousandth of the distance to the centre of the earth. Such superficial scratching of the earth assuredly does not justify us in announcing any law in regard to the relation of depth to temperature. And further, it is found that the rate of increase of temperature varies greatly in different It is not the purpose of the present article places, being most rapid in those localities to investigate the question of what volcanoes that are the scenes of volcanic disturbance. teach as to the earth's interior; the considerIt has likewise been found that in a single ation of volcanic phenomena will therefore be shaft the rate of increase of temperature dismissed with an illustration that bears on varies much for different depths, and that in the question we are discussing. In Hawaii, a few instances, after a considerable depth one of the Sandwich Islands, the two principal has been reached, there is a decrease in tem-active volcanoes are Kilauea, about 4,000 perature as we descend further.

The supply of hot water furnished to us by geysers, deep springs, and artesian wells is no indication of a liquid interior of the

feet above the sea level, and Mauna Lɔa, 10,000 feet higher. It is evident that these two adjacent volcanoes cannot be connected with the same reservoir of melted rock in the