Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 1.djvu/396

382 between 44° and 45° of north latitude nearly the same as are the White Mountains and the Adirondacks is 65 by 55 miles in area, and comprises 3,575 square miles.

Every portion of this area is more than 6,000 feet above the level of the ocean, or nearly as high as the summit of Mount Washington. In it is a beautiful sheet of water, the Yellowstone Lake, 330 square miles in area, and 7,42*7 feet above the sea. Tremendous gorges, chasms, canons, waterfalls, and forest, make this whole tract surpassingly wild. It is walled on every side by mountain-ridges, from 10,000 to 12,000 feet high. On these elevated summits lie perpetual snows, which feed three of the largest rivers in North America.

The sources of the Yellowstone and Missouri, which empty into the Mississippi, and thence into the Gulf of Mexico—of the Snake River, which flows westward to the Columbia and the Pacific—of the Green River, which discharges its waters through the Colorado into the Gulf of California—are among these mountains.

This whole region was in recent time volcanic. The mountains are of volcanic origin. A vast number of hot springs, mud-volcanoes and geysers of a temperature from 100° to 195° Fahrenheit, indicate the close proximity of the unextinguished fires.

On account of its great elevation, frost forms every month in the year. In summer the thermometer falls to 26°, but the air is clear and invigorating. The reservation of this wild and magnificent tract, so abounding in the most wonderful phenomena of Nature, was a wise foresight, and a tribute to Science in the highest degree honorable to our government.

a recent dinner of the London Academy of Art, Prof. Tyndall thus happily expressed himself touching the relations of art and science: "There is no reason why art and science should not dwell together in amity; for, though they are both suitors of the same mistress, Nature, they are so in a sense and fashion which preclude the thought of jealousy on either side. You love her for her beauty, we for her order and her truth; but I trust that neither of us is so narrow-hearted as to entirely exclude from himself the feelings which belong to the other. Indeed, each is necessary to the completion of the other. The dry light of the intellect, the warm glow of the emotions, the refined exaltation of the aesthetic faculty, are all part and parcel of human nature; and to be complete we must be capable of enjoying them all. Trust me that we, whose light on earth is for the most part that dry light to which I have referred, often seek, and sometimes have, 'glimpses that make us less forlorn' of those aspects of Nature which reveal themselves in all their fulness to the eyes of art. We need such glimpses as a compensation for much that the times have taken away from us. There are some of us workers in science who largely share the poet's yearning to 'hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn,' and who, nevertheless, in opposition to natural bias, have been compelled to give up, not only Triton, but many later forms of the power which for a time assumed his shape. Emptied of the hopes and pleasures flowing from such conceptions, we stand in more special need of all that Nature has to offer in the way of grandeur and beauty, of all that history has to offer in the way of strength and inspiration, and of such interpretations, by men of genius, of Nature, history, and contemporary life, as at this moment adorn these walls. If I might employ, in a sense so qualified as to render me sincere in using it, a form of language familiar to you all, I would say that we interpret these works of genius, these achievements in which our best men embody their highest efforts, as the outcome of the cultivated, but at the same time inborn and unpurchaseable gift of God. For, though the laborer be worthy of his hire, and though the leaders both in arts and science may now by good right make pleasant terms with the world, they reached the position which enables them to do this through periods of labor and resolute self-denial, during which their arts and their science were to them all in all; and reward was the necessary incident and not the motive power of their lives."

, in a fourth paper on "Changes of Climate during the Glacial Epoch," thus states his views as to the sequence of climates in England during this time: First, a succession of alternate