Beyond Alamo Mocho, which is on the old Yuma road, at the time of the flood, the water flowed into a number of lagoons, and thence into New River, following the old channel that was cut at the time of the 1849 overflow, and thus reaching and forming Salton Lake. All of the water leaving the main river at present finds its way down through the Hardy Colorado back to the Colorado proper, or evaporates. In the beginning of this article mention was made of a borehole that was sunk by the new Liverpool Salt Company in the salt marsh, and which revealed under a thin crust of mud and salt a depression filled with ooze, composed largely of magnesium and sodium salts. This ooze is probably the final resultant of the evaporations of the former sea water, and which, from the well-known avidity of the magnesian salts for moisture, is kept in this condition of ooze through the natural drainage and seepage waters. This depression may extend beyond the borders of the present marsh toward the gulf, covered over by the sand, and may have some relation with the small so-called mud volcanoes southeast of the lake near the station of Volcano, as well as with some openings in the ground mentioned by one of the gentlemen who investigated these regions between the Colorado River and the lake, and of which he stated that any amount of water running into them did not seem to fill them. Should such a connection exist, the water pouring in from the river would have dissolved the thin salt crust where exposed, and opened a channel, permitting a rapid filling in of the water which formed the lake, for otherwise a body of water running over this light sand and under such a dry, hot temperature would hardly have filled up the depression as rapidly as was the case. Besides, this would explain the reason for the fresh waters of the Colorado River attaining so rapidly a density of over 20° Baumé. Should this supposition prove correct, and it could easily be ascertained by a series of shallow boreholes, it might be expected that every large overflow in the Colorado River in this direction would result in a repetition of Salton Lake. Transcriber’s Notes —Retained publication information from the printed edition: this eBook is public-domain in the country of publication. —Silently corrected a few palpable typos. —Transcribed handwritten in-photo captions. —In the text versions only, text in italics is delimited by _underscores_. End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Old Mines of Southern California, by California State Mineralogist