15th. The little Fort had been a rude enough home, but years of acquaintance had endeared it, and it was iuxurious hospitality contrasted with the dangers of the prairie. Captain Wells, with a number of his Miamis, mounted on active Indian ponies, took the lead, and cantered from the shelter of the fort into the open. The regulars and the militia composing the garrison, the women, the children, and the waggons followed, and the rear was brought up by the remainder of the Miamis. There were fifers and drummers among the troops, and as they stepped outside the shelter of the log-houses they must needs strike up a tune. They played the "Dead March in Saul," and the weird mournful notes were perhaps the music most attuned at the moment to their feelings. By this time everybody took it for granted that there was to be trouble, in all probability disaster.

The escort of Pottawottomie Indians made a pretence to carry out their undertaking of a safe escort to Fort Wayne; but it was the merest pretence. Before the cavalcade had gone more than a mile the Pottawottomies silently by a sly détour stole away behind a ridge of sand-hills. Still, the whites must go ahead; there was no going back now. Suddenly Captain Wells turned his horse and spurred back to the main line, waving as he did so his hat in circles round his head. Generally, Captain Wells kept a spare bullet in his mouth in order that he might, when in action, load the quicker. That was an Indian trick; the circle he made with his hat meant frontier speech. It meant they were surrounded by Indians, that the moment of crisis had arrived. "They are to attack us," Captain Wells exclaimed to Captain Heald. "We must form instantly and charge them!" A pattering volley dropped in upon the troops as they got into line and prepared to charge over the bank on the savages. It was an easy thing for a body of disciplined soldiers to drive the Indians before them like March dust. But, routed in front, the Indians simply closed in on the flanks, and the soldiery could fight with little avail against so many. Instead of rendering assistance the friendly Miamis either. ran away or sat stolidly on their ponies looking at the wild work. And it was wild work! Captain Wells himself slew seven of the savages; he was in the forefront and thick of the onslaught. "There are seven red devils over there I have killed," he told his niece, the wife of Captain Heald. He was desperately wounded, and he asked if anybody survived that the message should be taken to his wife, "I died at my post, doing the best I could." Unquestionably, the most fascinating thread in the whole story, the feature which lightens up the butchery as heroism will lighten up the foulest transaction, is VOL. CCLXXV. NO. 1954.

EE

the death fight of Captain Wells. His horse was shot down under him, and being wounded he was from that moment practically at the mercy of his foes. A couple of friendlies tried to keep him out of harm, but perhaps he was not very anxious to go-anyhow he saw with equanimity a bunch of warriors drive towards him. As they approached he picked off the foremost with his revolver, and then challenged them to "shoot away," which they did. So one account puts it; another differs. In effect the second says that Captain Wells, while the two friendlies were trying to persuade him to a place of safety, was stabbed in the back by a chief, Pee-so-Tum, and then scalped. The one thing certain is that Captain Wells fought like a demon, and to the bitter end, only so uselessly.

Captain Heald, too, had been sorely wounded, and, with a fraction of his men, was isolated on a knoll in the prairie from the baggage waggons. In fifteen minutes from the crack of the first Indian musket, the baggage train with the women and the children had fallen into the hands of the Indians. A young savage climbed into a waggon containing twelve children, and plunged his tomahawk into the heads of every one of them. But for Black Partridge, Mrs. Helm, the young and charming wife of Lieutenant Helm, second in command of Fort Dearborn, would have shared the fate of the children. An Indian youth assailed her with a tomahawk, slashing and stabbing with the most vicious earnestness. Mrs. Helm seized hold of the lad and endeavoured to wrench the tomahawk from his grasp, and disarm him of his scalping knife. In the middle of the precarious struggle, she was lifted bodily up by a stalwart Indian, dragged to the lake, and plunged into the water. Black Partridge-it was he did not intend to drown her, however, and indeed saved her from further danger. Mrs. Heald, the wife of the commanding officer, with a beautiful horse she rode, long coveted by the Indians, had also been captured. The horse the Indians greatly prized, and years afterwards, although offered a good price, could not be tempted to part with it. Nothing remained for Captain Heald and those who survived but to surrender and take their chance at the hands of the Indians. Of the fifty-four regulars, twenty-six were slain in fight and five were murdered after the surrender; the twelve militiamen were killed, and twelve children and two women completed the bill of the Indian butchers. Thus, of a party of ninety-three who marched out of Fort Dearbornexcluding Captain Wells's Miami Indians-thirty-six only survived. Perhaps these, so threatening was their plight following the massacre, would almost have preferred to have figured in the list of dead.

Poor Captain Wells was made the subject of revenge to the lasthis scalp torn off, his body cut up, and his heart plucked out. Some of the prisoners eventually escaped, Captain and Mrs. Heald, and Lieutenant and Mrs. Helm, by the assistance of friendly Indians; but some never found their way back to civilisation. Chandonais, a half-breed chief, had got possession of Captain Heald in the distribution of the spoils of war. He sought out the captor of Mrs. Heald, brought her to her husband, and then one fine morning gave them a chance, which they quickly accepted, to escape in a birch bark canoe. John Kinzie, the old trader, had taken his share of the risks, come out of them scatheless, and gone back to his hut beside Fort Dearborn-the fort by this time laid utterly in ruins. It threatened to go ill with the Kinzie family, for distant savages came to Fort Dearborn, hoping they might make some late plunder. Billy Caldwell, the handsome son of a handsome Pottawottomie girl and an Irish colonel, came, however, to the rescue of the Kinzies, and they got away to a safe part of the country. Billy seems to have been something of a character, a picturesque figure with no small capacity for blarney, and it is a pity there is so little record extant of him. Partial retribution only could be exacted from the murderers of the Fort Dearborn garrison, since the times were troublous, and it was hard after they had scattered to get at them. In July, 1816, Captain Hezekiah Bradley, with two companies of soldiers, rebuilt Fort Dearborn and gathered together and buried the bones of the victims of the massacre. Down to 1837 the place continued to be occupied as an army post, and twenty years later the log-house was still in use for Government purposes.

To-day Fort Dearborn, with its bloody story of cut-throat savagery enacted within a not so very distant period, is ancient history in the land where it was the advance guard of civilisation. A twenty-story "sky-scraper" blinks grimly near the spot where it stood, and the tired welkin echoes the eternal ring of the almighty dollar.

JAMES MILNE.

SOME CURIOSITIES OF GEOLOGY.

W

HEN Professor Sedgwick became a geologist he is reported

to have said, "Hitherto I have never turned a stone; henceforth I will leave no stone unturned."

And the geologist who turns over in this spirit the written and unwritten records of geology is rewarded by the discovery of many curious facts and fancies connected with the study of the rocks.

The museums of our own and other countries contain many such curiosities of more than general interest. In that of Bath, for example, is a noble monument of the industry and patience of a well-known geologist, Charles Moore. This is his magnificent collection of fossils. One case is of special interest, as the record of an enormous amount of patient labour and skill.

At Holwell a fissure in the mountain limestone of that district had become filled in with rock material of a later-viz. a Triassicage. This material contained numerous fossils. Three tons of it were extracted, and carefully searched by Moore for fossils. The result is the collection in the above case. Notable among the rest is a collection of 70,000 teeth of a species of fish!

Among the most interesting fossils to be seen in any museum are those in which the bodies of the unborn young have been preserved within that of the parent. This is the case with certain specimens of the Ichthyosaurus, or fish reptile, of the Lias. In the museum at Tübingen are two skeletons of this ancient animal, each containing a single skeleton of an unborn young. One in the museum of Munich has five such specimens of unborn young within the cavity of its ribs. The most notable collection of such skeletons, however, is in the Stuttgart museum, where there are four full-grown specimens of Ichthyosaurus containing fossil young. Two of these have one each, one has four, while the other is said to contain upwards of seven young. There seems little doubt, from a consideration of the facts, that the small skeletons are really those of young which have never left their parents, and such is the general opinion held regarding them.

In some of the Paris museums are to be seen collections of wax

The story of how The growing plants

models of the flowers of plants of Eocene age. these have been obtained is an interesting one. were enveloped in calcareous mud, which afterwards hardened to travertine. Then the vegetable matter decaying left delicate moulds of their form in the rock. Into these moulds melted wax was introduced under an air-pump, and the calcareous matter then dissolved by acid. The result was these wonderfully perfect wax models of the delicate organs of the plants which lived in France long ere the advent of man.

The building of the earth-its geological structure has influenced in many cases the choice of sites for the human architect. One of the most ancient and interesting examples is where the geological structure of a particular spot has determined the position of a British camp. A great fault, known as the Clifton fault, brings down the soft upper limestone shales to a level with the hard carboniferous limestone. The softer rock has been more rapidly worn away by weathering, leaving an elevated ridge of the harder limestone along the line of fault. This commanding position has been chosen by some ancient Britons for the line of their camp. Little as they probably knew of geology, they have, nevertheless, marked an important geological feature by their choice of a site.

Our next example refers to the Romans. A portion of the line of their great wall from the Tyne to the Solway has been determined by the line of outcrop of a mass of igneous rock, known as the Great Whin Sill. This rock forms a bold, elevated ridge, with a steep escarpment facing north. On it, for a considerable distance, runs the wall with its numerous mile castles, and at one place stand the ruins of a considerable town, known as Borcovicus, or Housesteds. In the far distant geological past a great mass of igneous rock was forced in a molten state through the peacefully lying strata of the lower Carboniferous. It solidified, and now lies quietly interstratified with the other rocks. And in the far historical past the eruptive energy of the Romans invaded Britain, and forced their language, laws, and customs among the natives. The Roman element is now as completely interstratified with the native as the eruptive basalt with the sandstones and limestones of the Carboniferous. And here on the line of the Roman Wall are the indelible traces of the two eruptions in close contact.

The Whin Sill, leaving the line of the Roman Wall, runs north, and forming a rocky elevation on the coast not far south of Berwick, has determined the position of one of Northumberland's most noble castles, Bamburgh, the royal building of King Ida.