This very important trade in cattle, when fully developed, will probably be about equally divided between southern and central Kansas, each of which possesses its peculiar advantages for the business. While the valley of the Arkansas has longer grass, and more of it, the dealers in the Kaw region claim that their "feed" is the most nutritious. My own opinion, carefully formed, is that both sections are about equally good, and that the whole of western Kansas, with Colorado, will yet become the greatest stock-raising region of the world. The climate is peculiarly favorable. Two seasons out of three, on an average, cattle and sheep can graze during the winter, without any other cover than that of the ravines and the timber along the creeks. The herders who manage these large bodies of cattle are a distinctive and peculiar class. We saw numbers of them scurrying along over the country on their wild, lean mustangs, in appearance a species of centaur, half horse, half man, with immense rattling spurs, tanned skin, and dare-devil, almost ferocious faces. After an extensive acquaintance with the genus Texan, and with all due allowance for the better portion of it, I must say, as my deliberate judgment, that it embraces a larger number of murderers and desperadoes than can be found elsewhere in any civilized nation. A majority of these herders would think no more of snuffing out a life than of snuffing out a candle. Texas, in her rude solitude, formerly stretched protecting arms to the evil doers from other states, and to her these classes flocked. She offered them not a city but a whole empire of refuge. Just beyond Brookville, two hundred miles from the eastern border of Kansas, our road commenced ascending the Harker Bluffs, a series of sandstone ridges bordering on the plains. On our left, Mushroom Rock was pointed out to us, a huge table of stone poised on a solitary pillar, and strangely resembling the plant from which it is named. As the professor informed us, we were on the eastern shore of a once vast inland ocean, the bed of which now forms the plains. Sachem thought the rock might be a petrified toad-stool, on a scale with the gigantic toads which hopped around in the mud of that age of monsters. The professor thought it was fashioned by the waters, in their eddyings and washings. Subsequent examinations showed this entire region to be one of remarkable interest to the geologist. A few miles east of Mushroom Rock, near Bavaria, as we learned from the conductor, human foot-prints had been discovered in the sandstone. The professor, who had long ascribed to man an earlier existence upon earth than that given him by geology, was greatly excited, and at his earnest request, when the down train was met, we returned upon it to Bavaria. [Illustration: _BUREAU OF ILLUSTRATION_ MUSHROOM ROCK, On Alum Creek, near Kansas Pacific R. R.--From a Photograph.] [Illustration: _BUREAU OF ILLUSTRATION_