that of the head water of the Oregon or Columbia, or the source of that branch of it called Snake River or Lewis Fork.” To the astonishment of the adventurous travellers, they found the top of Frémont’s Peak visited by bees: perhaps, like the butterflies seen by me, also among perpetual snow but in much more elevated regions in the Andes of Peru, they had been carried thither involuntarily by ascending currents of air. I have seen in the Pacific, at a great distance from the coast, large winged lepidopterous insects fall on the deck of the ship, having, no doubt, been carried far out to sea by land winds. Frémont’s map and geographical investigations comprehend the extensive region from the junction of the Kanzas river with the Missouri, to the falls of the Columbia and to the missions of Santa Barbara and Pueblo de los Angeles in New California; or a space of 28 degrees of longitude, and from the 34th to the 45th parallel of latitude. Four hundred points have been determined hypsometrically by barometric observations, and, for the most part, geographically by astronomical observations; so that a district which, with the windings of the route, amounts to 3600 geographical miles, from the mouth of the Kanzas to Fort Vancouver and the shores of the Pacific (almost 720 miles more than the distance from Madrid to Tobolsk), has been represented in profile, shewing the relative heights above the level of the sea. As I was, I believe, the first person who undertook to represent, in geognostic profile, the form of entire countries,--such as the Iberian peninsula, the highlands of Mexico, and the cordilleras of South America, (the semi-perspective projections of a Siberian traveller, the Abbé Chappe, were founded on mere and generally ill-judged estimations of the fall of rivers),--it has given me peculiar pleasure to see the graphical method of representing the form of the earth in a vertical direction, or the elevation of the solid portions of our planet above its watery covering, applied on so grand a scale as has been done in Frémont’s map. In the middle latitudes of 37° to 43° the Rocky Mountains present, besides the higher snowy summits comparable with the Peak of Teneriffe in elevation, lofty plains of an extent hardly met with elsewhere on the surface of the earth, and almost twice as extensive in an east and west direction as that of the Mexican plateaux. From the group of mountains, which commences a little to the west of Fort Laramie to beyond the Wahsatch mountains, there is an uninterrupted swelling of the ground from 5300 to 7400 English feet above the level of the sea. A similar elevation may even be said to occupy the whole space from 34° to 45° between the Rocky Mountains proper and the Californian snowy coast chain. This space, a kind of broad longitudinal valley like that of the lake of Titiaca, has been called, by Joseph Walker, a traveller well acquainted with these western regions, and by Captain Frémont, “The Great Basin.” It