In Lieutenant Wheeler's report of operations on the geographical and geological survey of the Territories west of the 100th meridian during 1876, we find the first explanation of the origin of the name California. The mountainous country of Mexico has three climates through which the traveller passes in going from the sea to the high country, the hot, the temperate, and the cold zones. The Mexicans call them tierra caliente, tierra templada, and tierra fria. They entered the present region of California from Sonora or New Mexico, and on their way passed a lake now called Lake Elizabeth, on the border of the California desert. There a violent west wind blows night and day. It is a real sirocco, dry, and so hot as to remind one of a blast from a furnace. The Mexicans accordingly made the country beyond it the fourth in their series of ascending temperatures, and named it tierra california, the country hot as a furnace.
This report is one of the most valuable produced by the survey. During the year the great area in California which lies below the level of the sea was examined to ascertain whether it could be filled and maintained as a lake by a canal from the Colorado river, and the decision is in the negative. The depressed area covers about 1,600 square miles in California, and the difference between the rainfall and the evaporation is so small that if the whole Colorado river were poured into the basin, it would cover only 556 square miles of surface, or little more than one-third the basin. Filling would cease at that level for the reason that the whole supply of the river would disappear in vapor. The slope of the Colorado river is extraordinary, 2.13 feet per mile at Stone's Ferry, and 1.21 feet at Camp Mohave, which may be compared with eight inches, the average fall of the Mississippi per mile. At Stone's Ferry the velocity is 3.217 feet per second and the discharge 18,410 cubic feet. Great difficulties stand in the way of the proposed canal, and the engineers do not think the lake, if it could be formed, would have an appreciable effect upon the climate of the surrounding region. The primary object of this survey is to carry the grand triangulation of the continent across the country under its jurisdiction, and to map the surface so as to enable the Government to put the ground properly in market. In addition to these objects a great amount of valuable work is done in geology and natural history.
Prof. Jules Marcou, geologist attached to the survey, points out that the valleys of Santa Clara and Santa Barbara in California may become the site of true artesian oil wells. The ordinary flowing oil well is supposed to obtain the force which lifts its oil above the surface level from confined gases in the earth, but in California the lift will be obtained in precisely the same manner as in the case of artesian wells for water. There are strata of sandstone impregnated with the petroleum, and these strata are lifted up on the mountain sides, so that a well bored at a low point in the valley would be supplied from a reservoir some thousands of feet high. The wells will have to be about three thousand feet deep.
The naturalists of the survey noted many singular phenomena of animal life. On the islands off the coast there is a race of liliputian foxes which is supposed to have been derived from the Gray fox, its small size and perfect fearlessness, together with its insect diet, being due to its confinement to the islands. This animal is so small that even the sheep breeders do not fear it. It lies under the cactus plants for its noonday nap, and to this fact must be due the remarkable circumstance noticed in skinning a number of them. In every instance the interior surface of the hide was perforated by cactus spines, and in one individual the hide was fairly coated within by these spines, some of which had become soft with age. There were so many that a knife could not have pierced the hide without touching the spines!
Another fact developed was that the great dread of the grizzly bear is resulting in his rapid extinction. Strychnine is considered indispensable to the outfit of a California shepherd, and the grizzlies have been killed or forced to the mountains, where they still linger in considerable numbers in the chapparal. It is noticeable that the Rocky mountain grizzly is a tame creature compared with his brother of the Sierra Nevada, who does not hesitate to take the initiative in a combat with man.
A GERMAN SAVANT AMONG THE SIOUX.
Prof. Virchow lately informed the Berlin Anthropological Society that an intrepid young German traveller, Herr von Horn von der Horck, is now (January, 1877) living among the Sioux Indians busily engaged in taking plaster casts for craniological studies. Von der Horck made a journey to the Polar sea last summer, returning by way of Lapland, where he made enormous collections of bones, skulls, and casts. Prof. Virchow says these collections are more complete in Scandinavian ethnology than all that European museums outside of Scandinavia contain. One result of this journey was the discovery of a continuous water way between the Gulf of Bothnia and the Polar sea, though not one that is capable of navigation. A lake, called Wawalo Lampi, lies on the divide between these two bodies of water, and sends a river to each. The northward flowing one is the Ivallo and the southward the Kititui. We are glad to welcome so enthusiastic and thorough a student to this country. It is precisely work like his that is needed in America, and the time for accomplishing it is rapidly passing away. We have too much theory and too little real investigation in American ethnology, and while the men of hypotheses are talking about the origin of the Indians, and endeavoring to trace them to Asiatic stocks through the medium of language, the race is fast losing its purity by intermarriage, as it has already lost the most distinctive of its peculiarities by intercourse with the whites.
BALLOONING FOR AIR CURRENTS.