Different theories have been advanced to account for the origin of the Grand Canon, but it is a question whether it is altogether due to any one cause. Scientists say that it is the work of water erosion, but to the layman it seems impossible. If an ocean of water should flow over rocks during eons of ages it does not seem possible that it could cut such a channel. Water sometimes does queer things, but it has never been known to reverse nature. By a fundamental law of hydrostatics water always seeks its level and flows in the direction of least resistance. If water ever made the Grand Canon it had to climb a hill and cut its way through the backbone of the Buckskin mountains, which are not a range of peaks but a broad plateau of solid rock. Into this rock the canon is sunk more than a mile deep, from six to eighteen miles wide and over two hundred miles long. In order to make the theory of water erosion tenable it is assumed that the Colorado river started in its incipiency like any other river. After a time the river bed began to rise and was gradually pushed up more and more by some unknown subterranean force as the water cut deeper and deeper into the rock until the Grand Canon was formed. Captain Hance has a theory that the canon originated in an underground stream which tunneled until it cut its way through to the surface. As improbable as is this theory it is as plausible as the erosion theory, but both theories appear to be equally absurd. At some remote period of time the entire southwest was rent and torn by an awful cataclysm which caused numerous fissures and seams to appear all over the country. The force that did the work had its origin in the earth and acted by producing lateral displacement rather than direct upheaval. Whenever that event occurred the fracture which marks the course of the Grand Canon was made and, breaking through the enclosing wall of the Great Basin, set free the waters of an inland sea. What the seismic force began the flood of liberated water helped to finish, and there was born the greatest natural wonder of the known world. There are canons all over Arizona and the southwest that resemble the Grand Canon, except that they were made on a smaller scale. Many of them are perfectly dry and apparently never contained any running water. They are all so much alike that they were evidently made at the same time and by the same cause. Walnut Canon and Canon Diablo are familiar examples of canon formation. The rocks in the canons do not stand on end, but lie in horizontal strata and show but little dip anywhere. Indeed, the rocks lie so plumb in many places that they resemble the most perfect masonry.