beneath like a skeleton. The precipitation there has not been great
enough to destroy the old lines--only enough to mask them.

* There could be a balance of precipitation and still very little
snow- or rainfall, or they might be very great.


The "inner gorge" of the Grand Canyon appears to have been cut far
more rapidly than the outer one, and at a much later period; were
this not the case there would be no inner gorge. It is a singular
fact that some side canyons, the Kanab, for example, while now
possessing no running water, or at best a puny rivulet, and depending
for their corrasion on intermittent floods, meet on equal terms the
great Colorado, the giant that never for a second ceases its
ferocious attack. Admitting that the sharper declivity of the Kanab
would enhance its power of corrasion, nevertheless we should expect
to see it approach the Grand Canyon by leaps and bounds, like the
Havasupai farther down, but, on the contrary, there are parts that
appear to be at a standstill in corrasion, or even filling up, and
its floor is a regular descent, except for the last three or four
miles where the canyon is clogged by huge rocks that seem to have
fallen from above. The maximum height of its present flood-waters is
about six feet, proved by a fern-covered calcareous deposit,
projecting some fifteen feet, caused by a spring (Shower-Bath Spring)
on the side of the wall, seven or eight miles above the mouth, which
is never permitted by the floods to build nearer the floor of the
canyon. A suspicion arises, on contemplating some of these apparent
discrepancies, that the prevailing conditions of corrasion are not
what they were at some earlier period, when they were such that it
was rendered more rapid and violent; that there was perhaps an epoch