Albany has three newspapers, six churches, a very good collegiate school, and excellent common schools. It is a principal station on the Oregon and California Railroad, and also an important station on the Oregon Pacific, now so rapidly building, and its point of crossing the Oregon and California, and a junction for the branch line to Lebanon, away there under the slopes of the Cascades. Land in the neighborhood of the town, and indeed throughout the level portions of Linn County, ranging over an area of nearly twenty miles each way, is worth from twenty-five to sixty dollars an acre--the last sale I heard of, of one hundred and thirty-two acres, about five miles from the town, being at thirty-nine dollars an acre. [Sidenote: _CORVALLIS AND EUGENE CITY._] The next town we come to is our own Corvallis, appropriately named as the heart of the valley. It is indeed fitly placed as the valley starting-point seaward of the Oregon Pacific Railroad, being on the direct line east and west between Yaquina Bay, the Mount Jefferson Pass through the Cascades, Prineville, in Eastern Oregon, Harney Lake and Valley, the Malheur River and Valley, and Boisé City--the meeting-place in the near future of divers transcontinental lines. Corvallis has been too fully described in these pages to need further reference here. The commencement of energetic construction of the Oregon Pacific and the assurance of its early completion have given an increased business-life to the place which impresses the visitor strongly with the idea of rapid future growth. Continuing in our steamboat to the head of the Willamette navigation, we pass the little towns of Peoria and Harrisburg, and at last reach Eugene City. This, which is the chief town of Lane County, is blessed with a university, presided over by excellent professors, one of whom, Professor Condon, has a name and fame as a geologist far beyond the limits of his county and also of the State. I trust the time will soon come when the liberality of the Legislature of Oregon will provide the funds necessary to enable Professor Condon to complete and publish the systematic geology and mineralogy of Oregon, the materials for which are already to a large extent in his possession, the result of years of careful study and journeyings over the State. Eugene City is a lively, pleasant little town, but has not yet attained any manufacturing or industrial development like some of the other towns in Oregon. This is to come.