Dashing through a grove of cottonwood trees draped in bignonia and ivy, we came out suddenly upon a charming scene: a range of huts and forts crowning a long low hill seamed with many a timber-clothed ravine, while the clear stream of the Republican fork wreathed itself about the woods and bluffs. The block-house, over which floated the stars and stripes, was Fort Riley, the Hyde Park Corner from which continents are to measure all their miles; the “capital of the universe,” or “centre of the world.” Not that it has always been so. Geographers will be glad to learn that not only does the earth gyrate, but that the centre of its crust also moves: within the last ten years it has removed westwards into Kansas from Missouri—from Independence to Fort Riley. The contest for centreship is no new thing. Herodotus held that Greece was the very middle of the world, and that the unhappy Orientals were frozen, and the yet more unfortunate Atlantic Indians baked every afternoon of their poor lives in order that the sun might shine on Greece at noon; London plumes herself on being the “centre of the terrestrial globe;” Boston is the “hub of the hull universe,” though the latter claim is less physical than moral, I believe.