My first operation after encamping and arranging my instruments, was to sink the ground thermometer; but the earth being frozen for sixteen inches, it took four men several hours’ work with hammer and chisel, to penetrate so deep. There was much vegetable matter for the first eight or ten inches, and below that a fine red clay. I spent the afternoon, which was fine, in botanising. When the sun shone, the smell of the two rhododendrons was oppressive, especially as a little exertion at this elevation brings on headache. There were few mosses; but crustaceous lichens were numerous, and nearly all of them of Scotch, Alpine, European, and Arctic kinds. The names of these, given by the classical Linnæus and Wahlenberg, tell in some cases of their birth-places, in others of their hardihood, their lurid colours and weather-beaten aspects; such as _tristis, gelida, glacialis, arctica, alpina, saxatilis, polaris, frigida,_ and numerous others equally familiar to the Scotch botanist. I recognised many as natives of the wild mountains of Cape Horn, and the rocks of the stormy Antarctic ocean; since visiting which regions I had not gathered them. The lichen called _geographicus_ was most abundant, and is found to indicate a certain degree of cold in every latitude; descending to the level of the sea in latitude 52° north, and 50° south, but in lower latitudes only to be seen on mountains. It flourishes at 10,000 feet on the Himalaya, ascending thence to 18,000 feet. Its name, however, was not intended to indicate its wide range, but the curious maplike patterns which its yellow crust forms on the rocks. Of the blocks of gneiss scattered over the Jongri spur, many are twenty feet in diameter. The ridge slopes gently south-west to the Choroong river, and more steeply north-east to the Ratong, facing Kinchin: it rises so very gradually to a peaked mountain between Jongri and Kubra, that it is not possible to account for the transport and deposit of these boulders by glaciers of the ordinary form, viz., by a stream of ice following the course of a valley; and we are forced to speculate upon the possibility of ice having capped the whole spur, and moved downwards, transporting blocks from the prominences on various parts of the spur. The cutting up of the whole surface of this rounded mountain into little pools, now dry, of all sizes, from ten to about one hundred yards in circumference, is a very striking phenomenon. The streams flow in shallow transverse valleys, each passing through a succession of such pools, accompanying a step-like character of the general surface. The beds are stony, becoming more so where they enter the pools, upon several of the larger of which I observed curving ridges of large stones, radiating outwards on to their beds from either margin of the entering stream: more generally large stones were deposited opposite every embouchure.