fissures, and its outcroppings above Weehawken come forward to the Hudson River bank in the grand escarpment of the Palisades. These remarkable columnar formations of trap rock extend for twenty miles along the western shore of the river, and in part appear to be built up of basalt. To connect the various railways terminating at Jersey City with New York, a tunnel is being constructed under the Hudson River; and two others, and also a gigantic bridge, are projected. I have already referred to Staten Island, which is the western border of New York harbor, where its pleasant hill-slopes add so much to the scenic beauty. The narrow "Kills," stretching for nearly twenty miles down to Perth Amboy, make its western boundary, separating the island, which is the Borough of Richmond in Greater New York, from New Jersey, to which by right it is said to belong. It covers about sixty square miles, with its diversified hill-slopes rising in some places to an elevation of over four hundred feet, and has probably seventy thousand population. It is shaped something like a leaf, hung, as it were, upon the long projecting peninsula between Newark Bay and New York harbor, the Kill von Kull stretching westward to divide it from this peninsula, which at that part is the town and port of Bayonne, running off into Bergen Point at the lower end of Bergen Hill. It was from Bergen Point that General Washington in 1787 was rowed in a barge to New York, to be inaugurated the first President of the United States. From Elizabethport, on the western side of Newark Bay, the Arthur Kill stretches, a narrow strait, far southward, broadening somewhat into Staten Island Sound, and debouching at Perth Amboy into the western end of Raritan Bay. Perth Amboy was the terminus of the original line of the Camden and Amboy Railroad. It was the capital of the Colonial Province of New Jersey two centuries ago, and its eligible position at the confluence of Staten Island Sound and the Raritan River and Bay, the point of union of the various interior water ways, made it at that early period very ambitious. In fact, "Perthtown, or Ompoge on Ambo" (the Indian name for the point, which meant "round and hollow"), then rivalled New York in commercial importance. Its name came from the Earl of Perth, one of the grantees of lands in East Jersey. Early travellers flocked thither, praising its merits; and even William Penn was persuaded to go over and look at it, oracularly declaring, "I have never seen such before in my life," whatever that might have meant. But New York, with its great harbor, ultimately overshadowed Amboy, and it has since dropped out, even as a way-station on the route between the two leading cities. It has about fifteen thousand inhabitants, and its trade chiefly consists in shipping coal and fire-clay, brought out by the railroads.