capital, presently to be solidified into just such rock pillars as throng the cemeteries or aid in composing the strange architectural piles mentioned above.  Surveyor-General Pierce of Colorado, (a man whose fine scientific genius and culture have already done yeoman’s service in the study of that most interesting Territory,) on a certain occasion, saw one of these wind-and-silex augers meet at right angles a window-pane in a settler’s cabin, which came out from the process, after a few seconds, a perfect opaque shade, having been converted into ground-glass as neatly and evenly as could have been effected by the manufacturer’s wheel.  It is not a very rare thing in Colorado to be able to trace the spiral and measure the diameter of the auger by rocks of fifty pounds’ weight and tree-trunks half as thick as an average man’s waist, torn up from their sites, and sent revolving overhead for miles before the windy turbine loses its impetus.  The efficiency of an instrument like this I need not dwell upon.  After some protracted examination and study of many of the most interesting architectural and sculpturesque structures of the Rocky-Mountain system, I am convinced that they are mainly explicable on the hypothesis of the wind-and-silex instrument operating upon material in the earthy condition, which petrified after receiving its form.  Indeed, this same instrument is at present nowise restricted by that condition in Colorado, and is not only, year by year, altering the conformation of all sand and clay bluff’s on the Plains, but is tearing down, rebuilding, and fashioning on its facile lathe many rock-strata of the solidity of the more friable grits, wherever exposed to its action.  Water at the East does hardly more than wind at the West.

Before we enter the City of the Saints, let me briefly describe the greatest, not merely of the architectural curiosities, but, in my opinion, the greatest natural curiosity of any kind which I have ever seen or heard of.  Mind, too, that I remember Niagara, the Cedar-Creek Bridge, and the Mammoth Cave, when I speak thus of the Church Buttes.

They are situated a short distance from Fort Bridger; the overland road passes by their side.  They consist of a sandstone bluff, reddish-brown in color, rising with the abruptness of a pile of masonry from the perfectly level plain, carved along its perpendicular face into a series of partially connected religious edifices, the most remarkable of which is a cathedral as colossal as St. Peter’s, and completely relieved from the bluff on all sides save the rear, where a portico joins it with the main precipice.  The perfect symmetry of this marvellous structure would ravish Michel Angelo.  So far from requiring an effort of imagination to recognize the propriety of its name, this church almost staggers belief in the unassisted naturalness of its architecture.  It belongs to a style entirely its own.  Its main and lower portion is not divided into nave and transept,