Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/238

226 marshy, but has been in this century greatly improved by a process of controlling the mountain-streams and making them deposit their detritus so as to increase the grade. Notice on the west side how the layer of tufa overlying Pliocene sands resists erosion and makes flat-capped, naturally-walled hills. The site of Orvieto is a good example. In Florence are also collections, but the Tuscan Exposition of 1887 will probably have altered their arrangement.

At Prato, a little north of Florence, famous for vanilla-drops and a bronze screen, we may leave the train and walk a few miles to Monte Ferrato, where there are quarries of a beautiful gabbro, pietra verde, much used for decoration. It is surrounded by serpentine and porcelanized slate. At the Cave del Acqua it is most coarse and fresh. Soon after we turn sharply and cross the Apennines over to Bologna (3, 23). As from Turin to Genoa, so here—the whole range is Tertiary and the same horizons which in Belgium we saw hardly disturbed since their deposition, are here highly metamorphosed. The University of Bologna has a fine, well-ordered collection, especially to be visited by those who will tarry a little in the Euganeans, where Petrarch was born (10). Thus they will get an idea of the peculiar volcanic products awaiting them. There are still hot baths at Battaglia.

Every one will notice the Holland-like character of the country about Ferrara, and the way the Po flows along with its bed above the adjacent fields, over pebbles from the Alps far away, and will wonder how long it will be before the lagoons about Venice will in their turn become fertile plains. We have been around Italy. We may now go via Verona—don't pay the awful prices the man at the amphitheatre asks for his fossils—and Trent up into the Tyrol. The Tyrol and Switzerland are geographically but not geologically divided, so I need add only a reference to the work of Von Buch on the dolomites (10), and that of the Austrian geologists (12*). In Innsbruck is a very full geognostic collection.

We may go hence to Munich, where Groth's new laboratory affords every luxury to the mineralogist and petrographer, and Zittel conducts the most famous school of paleontology in the world, and Gumbel directs the Bavarian survey (3). Or the route to Vienna, by way of the Salzkammergut, is interesting, and the city is a focus of scientific interest, with a magnificent university.

Farther east the casual tourist will scarcely go, although no country of Europe surpasses Hungary in geological interest, where there are several important mining centers. I have been as far as Constantinople, with no extra trouble except that