would do well to ply between the mouth of the Yellow Stone and Marias River, twelve miles below Fort Benton. The water in the river is still muddy, and refutes the charge that its muddy appearance all comes from the Yellow Stone and Milk River, the mouths of which we have passed. The fort we established here was called Fort Jacobs, in honor of the commander of our boat, the Roanoke, but afterwards changed to Fort Copeland. We put into it several hundred tons of freight with a squad of men left to protect it.

We left Fort Jacobs on the 28th, after unloading our vessel and reducing her draught, and the next morning passed the mouth of Dry River, the bed of a once powerful stream coming in from the west. Here we met the steamer Gen. Grant, which had been fired into by the Indians, some of her crew attacked while hunting the channel in the small boat, three of them killed, and one badly wounded, who made his escape to the steamer with the pilot, by swimming, their boat having been captured by the Indians.

We passed the remains of Fort Gilpin, an old trading post, having been recently burnt by the natives, and the 29th were at Round Butte, a most noted land mark, a conical mountain on the west side of the river, four hundred and eighty five miles above the mouth of the Yellow Stone, and that marks the entrance to the Bad Lands, the Mauvaises Terres of the French. Here the whole face of the country becomes suddenly changed, not only into broken and abrupt precipices, but in the color of its soil, which is a whitish clay, and is seen for many miles before reaching it. Here we leave the buffalo. A few antelope and mountain sheep are found, with some bears, onthe outskirts of this singular tract of land.

On entering the Bad Lands, the river, which passes through a part of them, becomes narrow and crooked, with many rapids full of rock. Here the Mussel Shell River empties from the west, the last one of any importance that comes into the Missouri below Fort Benton. This country is claimed by the Crow Indians, an encampment of which we passed of about four hundred. They are friendly now with the whites, and were very anxious for us to land and trade with them, running

along the banks of the river, exhibiting their buffalo robes for sale. Some of our party landed, and we left them to trade for some ponies, which they did, and came up with us three days after by a short cut through the country guided by Indians. We now come to gravelly bars in the river, the first we have seen, and also boulders on the shore and in the river, which is now clear from its muddy appearance.

We met to-day, July 2d, the steamer Lilly Martin, bound for St. Louis, and in the evening reached Cow Island, at the foot of rapids, to force our boat over which, all efforts were useless. And thus was our passage by water at an end on the Missouri River, two hundred miles by water below Fort Benton, and one hundred by land. Sixty miles of this distance were through the Mauvaises Terres. Of the Mauvaises Terres, or Bad Lands, but little is known, they never having been explored except by the hunter and trapper. It is difficult to describe them, so unlike are they to any other formation of the Rocky Mountains. Their boundaries are undefined, but are supposed to be in extent about two hundred miles in length, and some one hundred and fifty miles in breadth. The entrance into them by the river is bold and abrupt, rising at once into broken cliffs, turreted domes, castles and cities in most magnificent splendor and beauty. But little rock is found, and the formation is a light colored, hard clay, worn into the most fantastic shape by the action of wind and storm for ages past, and hardened by the sun. No level surface is found to any extent, nor timber or vegetation, except of a stunted growth. A universal waste of chaotic matter seems thrown together in most beautiful confusion. One great object of interest, and almost the only one found here, is its petrifactions. Fossils are abundant of the remains of animals belonging to a race that inhabited the earth long before the period of man, and as the traveller climbs the rugged cliff, or gropes his way among the dark, deep dells and yawning gulfs of this wonderful country, his interest increases, and he struggles on heedless of time, distance, or danger.

Here we dig up the bones of crocodiles, we find the vertebræ and jawbones of the lizard, and other monster reptiles that once lived in the sea as well as on the land. The remains of

the huge mastodon are here, and petrified fish with fin and scale, having no resemblance to anything which can be found at the present day. We travel over a country elevated more than seven thousand feet above the level of the ocean, and stumble over the fossil remains of the sea. Ages have come and gone, and the life and animation that once filled these regions have perished.

It is an impressive thought that man's history is not found recorded like the beasts, the birds and the reptiles, that lived thousands of years before him. We trample over fossils of early creations, while the history of our own race, which dates comparatively but as yesterday, with all its works of art, cities, kingdoms and thrones, has perished by convulsions of nature, or the wasting of time, like Pompeii, almost without a record! The simple footprints of enormous birds that lived long before the period of man, found impressed in rocks, tell of an unknown species, but where shall we look for traces of the race of giants, or the difference in form, habits or color of our own race. Is it not evidently the plan of the Creator for man to be the only agent to work out the history of creation with the material furnished by himself, together with the hills and the valleys, the mountains and the sea?

This is an immense field for the imagination to sweep over, as the traveller climbs the rugged pinnacles that have been left solitary sentinels all over this once submerged country. What powerful agencies must have been employed to pile up in rich confusion miles and miles of strata, and raise solid granite mountains from the ocean bed, until their tops mingle with the clouds of heaven! And how great the Being who planned the scheme and quickened the forces into action!

If it be true, as geologists tell us, that our continent was once covered by water, and the upheaval of the earth by the action of heat turned the sea into lakes and rivers, then can we in some degree comprehend the great and mighty work before us. If once the Gulf of Mexico stretched itself with its broad expanse of waters along the base of the Rocky Mountains and the heads of the Missouri River, and beyond, even into British America, and to the Arctic Ocean, then may we be

able to account for the bones of fish and pearly shells of ocean that we find on the highest of these mountains.

And was this long ages before the creation of man? Did these mighty changes take place through successive periods of centuries, or were mountain and valley, hill and dale, forced up suddenly in a molten state, through the surging billows of a shoreless ocean, and left to cool while the waters tore their way through rocky dell and leaping cataract, digging the stupendous gorge thousands of feet below, forming river, lake and streamlet? We need not wonder now at the immense fields of the burnt quartz, and the melted ores of the precious metals that are found all through the Rocky Mountains.

We travelled through the Bad Lands for sixty miles, following up the bed of a once powerful river, but now without water sufficient to supply our animals with drink. It abounded in petrifactions, and would have afforded us wide range for collections, but the extreme heat of the weather, the want of mules, and the hostility of the Indians, who sometimes wander through here, prevented our further examination. Our track led us again to the banks of the Missouri, which passes through a treeless prairie ocean here, and timber is not found upon its banks until we reach the Grand Falls, eighty miles above Fort Benton. From Fort Benton our journey lay westward across Sun River and over several ranges of the Rocky Mountains, four hundred miles to Virginia City, in Montana Territory.

ARTICLE III.

WILL THIS PLANET EVER BE HEAVEN ?

THE SCRIPTURAL ARGUMENT.

Ir is not our purpose to enter the lists with such men of science as Hitchcock, Agassiz and Dr. John Pye Smith; nor with such biblical interpreters as Chrysostom, Augustine and Theodoret among the ancients, and Luther, Knapp and Chalmers among the moderns. We acknowledge the weight of their authority and the soundness of their scholarship. And yet we

must claim the inalienable right of dissent. And the more we study the subject, the more we incline to dissent. We disclaim the dogma that this world is to be purified by fire, and refitted for the home of the redeemed. It is their theory, not Peter's, nor Paul's. And our object in this paper is to review the scriptural testimonies, and state the convictions to which a careful analysis of them has conducted us.

We hold, therefore, that this our globe is to be, not " purified," but destroyed, by fire; "destroyed," not in the sense of annihilation, but of dissolution. The "destruction" of a material body is simply its disorganization. A tree is "destroyed" when it dies and moulders back to dust. A faggot is "destroyed" when consumed in the flame; it is gone, but not annihilated; its substance has only assumed another shape; its particles are all in being somewhere, only now no longer compacted in the wood, but dispersed. He who created can annihilate. But we have no evidence that he ever does annihilate. Amid all the changes around us, the death of plants and animals, the consumption of wood and coal, the corrosion and oxidation of metals, the disintegration of rocks, the decay of substances organic and inorganic, it does not appear that a single atom is lost. There may be a transition into other forms, but not a dismissal into blank extinction.

Not annihilation then, but dissolution, awaits this earth; an entire disorganization; a decomposition and dispersion of its elements. Whether these scattered elements will ever be recombined, and if so, into what forms they will be moulded, and to what purposes destined, is not revealed. But that this planet is to be "purified by fire," and refurnished for the occupancy of the heavenly hosts, must be pronounced a human theory, without sufficient foundation in the Word of God. We believe reconstruction is as far from the truth in one direction, as annihilation is in the other.

I. The biblical language describes a literal dissolution; and without hint of a subsequent reëstablishment. The announcement of Peter, which is the locus classicus on this subject, is : "The day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night; in the which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the - elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the