Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 2.djvu/420

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404
H. S. Lyman.

printed here in multifold chapters, and these same uplifted strata offer to industry the incentive to examination.

2. We have an interesting meteorolgy. A Californian, commenting on our state, said that we seemed to have more weather than climate. The reverse would be dubious—that California has more climate than weather. Here, undoubtedly, the seasonal changes are much more marked; but who would forego the influences of cloudland? At least in a literary point of view the changes of the sky, its winds and storms, and the music of the sea, have no compensation in perpetual serenity. Our climate, moreover, is of such extensive diversification, and offers such wide range of study and choice, that it would be a truculent author indeed who could not find somewhere the meterological moods that touched his fancy or waked his genius. Indeed, it is not too much to say that in both of the above the student of science not only will find herein ample field, but that no science can be completed without recourse to northwestern states. Already the science of the age, in the person of Professor Huxley, has been indebted to Oregon, in the person of Professor Condon, for the most complete demonstration yet made in paleontology of the law of evolution; a debt, however, not yet acknowledged. If literature is to be the mirror of nature, in the field of either poetry or science our states are the place for it.

3. Characteristics of native races have nowhere been better developed, or more accurately and sympathetically recorded. We have already hundreds of well defined Indian characters within reach of literary development; we have a considerable collection of their myths and legends; and what is more to the point, we have a very considerable remnant of the Indians themselves. Certainly they are not now in their original, exteriors; but their characters remain, and they are in many respects