ninety-three feet. From the top of the mountain the view is very fine; on a clear day even grand. If a good grade should be made from the toll house, an easy matter, the locality would soon become a favorite place of

resort.

There is reason to believe that St. Helena was once an active volcano, although the summit does not now present a crater-like appearance. That the action has not yet ceased is evinced by the hot springs at Calistoga and elsewhere, the emanations of carbonic acid in Clear Lake, especially at the remarkable spring at Soda Bay, the sulphur bank and quicksilver mines, and the ammoniacal springs near by.

June 12, 1841, this mountain was ascended by Wosnessensky, a Russian naturalist, sent out by the Academy of Science of St. Petersburg. He placed an engraved copper plate on the summit, which was removed by some vandal who found it there. It came into the possession of Dr. J. A. Veatch, who presented it to the California State Geological Survey. It would be interesting to know where it is now.

About Clear Lake there are great quantities of obsidian, from which the Indians for many years have not only made arrow and spear points, but have exported the material, or the manufactured articles, to distant tribes. After thinking the matter over since my visit to this very interesting locality, and knowing of the evidences of recent volcanic action (recent in a geological sense only), I see no reason why the mountain may not again break out into active eruption at any time. It is not an uncommon circumstance for volcanoes to remain dormant for centuries, and then, without any special preliminary symptoms, to break out into violent eruption. Our frequent earthquakes are another evidence that the stupendous piles of eruptive matter, the result of volcanic action in centuries past, were thrown out by subterranean forces not yet extinct. Etna remained dormant for several hundred years at a time; once, within historical period, for four hundred years; another interval was three hundred and fifty years. Vesuvius had been inactive for ages, when it suddenly burst into flames in the year 78 A. D., at which time the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum were destroyed. It now rises only two thousand three hundred feet above the sea level; but in 1868, when augmented by the piling up of eruptive matter, its summit reached the height of four thousand two hundred and fifty-three feet-nearly that of St. Helena at present. I would advise tourists in California to visit the hot springs of Calistoga, Clear Lake, and the summit of Mount St. Helena.