Himalayan Journals — Volume 2: Or, Notes of a Naturalist in Bengal, the Sikkim and Nepal Himalayas, the Khasia Mountains, etc.Hooker, Joseph Dalton
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Himalayan Journals — Volume 2: Or, Notes of a Naturalist in Bengal, the Sikkim and Nepal Himalayas, the Khasia Mountains, etc.
Hooker, Joseph Dalton
Himalaya Mountains -- Description and travel; Natural history -- Himalaya Mountains
This, for example, may be seen in the
bed of the great Rungeet, below Dorjiling, where the slates overlie
mica schists, and where the latter contain beds of conglomerate. In
these volumes I have often used the more familiar term of
stratification, for foliation. This arises from my own ideas of the
subject not having been clear when the notes were taken.]
The plants found close to the snow were minute primroses, _Parnassia,
Draba,_ tufted wormwoods (_Artemisia_), saxifrages, gentian, small
_Compositae,_ grasses, and sedges. Our ponies unconcernedly scraped
away the snow with their hoofs, and nibbled the scanty herbage.
When I mounted mine, he took the bit between his teeth, and
scampered back to Palung, over rocks and hills, through bogs and
streams; and though the snow was so blinding that no object could be
distinguished, he brought me to the tents with unerring instinct, as
straight as an arrow.
Wild animals are few in kind and rare in individuals, at Tungu and
elsewhere on this frontier; though there is no lack of cover and
herbage. This must be owing to the moist cold atmosphere; and it
reminds me that a similar want of animal life is characteristic of
those climates at the level of the sea, which I have adduced as
bearing a great analogy to the Himalaya, in lacking certain natural
orders of plants. Thus, New Zealand and Fuegia possess, the former no
land animal but a rat, and the latter very few indeed, and none of
any size. Such is also the case in Scotland and Norway. Again, on the
damp west coast of Tasmania, quadrupeds are rare; whilst the dry
eastern half of the island once swarmed with opossums and kangaroos.
A few miles north of Tungu, the sterile and more lofty provinces of
Tibet abound in wild horses, antelopes, hares, foxes, marmots, and
numerous other quadrupeds; although their altitude, climate, and
scanty vegetation are apparently even more unsuited to support such
numbers of animals of so large a size than the karroos of South
Africa, and the steppes of Siberia and Arctic America, which
similarly abound in animal life. The laws which govern the
distribution of large quadrupeds seem to be intimately connected with
those of climate; and we should have regard to these considerations
in our geological speculations, and not draw hasty conclusions from
the absence of the remains of large herbivora in formations
disclosing a redundant vegetation.
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