"It is an interesting fact to note that the military survey made in 1853 went over this ground and predicted the very thing which has now happened. The flooding of the desert will be a good thing for the surrounding country, for it does away with a large tract of absolutely useless land, so barren that it is impossible to raise there what the man in Texas said they mostly raised in his town, and it will increase the humidity of the surrounding territory. Nature has done with this piece of waste land what it has often been proposed to do by private enterprise or by public appropriation. Congress has often been asked to make an appropriation for that purpose." Mr. McGillivray had also some interesting things to say about Death Valley, which he surveyed. "It has been called a _terra incognita_ and a place where no human being could live. Well, it is bad enough, but perhaps not quite so bad as that. The great trouble is the scarcity of water and the intense heat. But many prospecting parties go there looking for veins of ore and to take out borax. The richest borax mines in the world are found there. The valley is about 75 miles long by 10 miles wide. The lowest point is near the center, where it is about 150 ft. below the level of the sea. Just 15 miles west of this central point is Telescope peak, 11,000 ft. above the sea, and 15 miles east is Mt. Le Count, in the Funeral mountains, 8,000 ft. high. The valley runs almost due north and south, which is one reason for the extreme heat. The only stream of water in or near the valley flows into its upper end and forms a marsh in the bed of the valley. This marsh gives out a horrible odor of sulphureted hydrogen, the gas which makes a rotten egg so offensive. Where the water of this stream comes from is not very definitely known, but in my opinion it comes from Owen's lake, beyond the Telescope mountains to the west, flowing down into the valley by some subterranean passage. The same impurities found in the stream are also found in the lake, where the water is so saturated with salt, boracic acid, etc., that one can no more sink in it than in the water of the Great Salt lake; and I found it so saturated that after swimming in it a little while the skin all over my body was gnawed and made very sore by the acids. Another reason why I think the water of the stream enters the valley by some fixed subterranean source is the fact that, no matter what the season, the flow from the springs that feed the marsh is always exactly the same. "The heat there is intense. A man cannot go an hour without water without becoming insane. While we were surveying there, we had the same wooden cased thermometer that is used by the signal service. It was hung in the shade on the side of our shed, with the only stream in the country flowing directly under it, and it repeatedly registered 130 deg.; and for 48 hours in 1883, when I was surveying there, the thermometer never once went below 104 deg.."--_Boston Herald._