under water, and might, to all human perception, have better remained so. I can not comprehend those who talk of the Plains and the more intensely arid wilds which mainly compose Utah and Nevada becoming a great stock-growing region. Even California, though its climate favors the rapid multiplication and generous growth of cattle and sheep, can never sustain so many animals to the square mile as the colder and more rugged hills of New York and New England, because of the intense protracted drouth of its summers, which suffer no blade of grass to grow throughout the six later months of every year. Animals live and thrive on the dead-ripe herbage of the earlier months; but a large area is soon exhausted by a herd, which must be pastured elsewhere till the winter rains ensure a renewal of vegetation. But the grasses of the Great Valley and of a large portion of the Plains are exceedingly scanty where they exist at all, so that the teams and herds annually driven across them by emigrants and traders suffer fearfully, and are often decimated by hunger, though they carefully seek out and adhere to the trails whereon feed is least scanty. Many a weary day's journey, even along the valleys of the North Platte and Sweetwater, brings to view too little grass to sustain the life of a moderate herd; those who have traversed the South Pass in June will generally have just escaped starvation, leaving to those that come straggling or tottering after them a very poor feed. The carcasses of dead animals, in every stage of decomposition, thickly stud the great trail from the banks of the Platte westward to the passes of the Sierra Nevada, and, I presume, to the banks of the Columbia, bearing mute but impressive testimony to the chronic inhospitality of the Great American Desert, which is almost everywhere thinly overgrown by worthless shrubs, known to travelers as grease-wood and sage brush;--the former prickly and repellant, but having a waxy or resinous property which renders it useful to emigrants as fuel; the latter affording shelter and subsistence to rabbits and a poor species of grouse known as the 'sage hen,' but utterly worthless to man and to the beasts obedient to his sway.