only for the people of America, but for those of Asia as well. To the north of the Klamath Mountains, which shut in the central Valley of California at the north, lies the beautiful Willamette Valley, about 150 miles long, drained by the northward-flowing river of the same name, which joins the Columbia where the thriving city of Portland now stands. The depression between the mountains of which the Valley of the Willamette forms a part, extends north of the Columbia, and is there drained by the southward-flowing Cowlitz River. The relation of these two valleys is much the same, although on a smaller scale, as that existing between the San Joaquin and Sacramento Valleys, except that the Columbia, after passing through the Cascade Mountains, receives the Willamette and Cowlitz rivers as tributaries, one from each side of its course. This Willamette-Cowlitz depression is surrounded by densely forested hills and the snow-capped summits of ancient volcanoes. The soil was originally highly fertile, and although now somewhat impoverished, still furnishes a substantial basis for agriculture, and renders the region one of the most productive as well as most beautiful in the United States. To the geographer the Willamette-Cowlitz Valley seems scarcely distinct from the great depression farther north in the same valley-chain, which now holds the waters of Puget Sound, except that there is a low water-parting between. This divide, as previously suggested, is thought to be due largely to stream and glacial deposits, which have been laid down in the previously nearly level-floored intermontane trough. The Puget Sound basin has a length from south to north of about 150 miles, and extends from the Olympic Mountains on the west to the Cascade Mountains on the east, a distance of some 60 miles. The sound terminates at the north at the Strait of Fuca (at Port Townsend, in Fig. 23), but the depression in which it lies continues northward, with similar geographical and geological characteristics. In a general way the same depression may be said to extend northward to southeastern Alaska, but is there deeply water-filled, and its western border is discontinuous and broken into many islands.