I may not undertake to describe to you in a single lecture the Geography of Deseret, and its Great Basin. Were I to consider the face of the country, its military position, or its climate and its natural productions; each head, I am confident, would claim more time than you have now to spare me. For Deseret is emphatically a New Country; new in its own characteristic features, newer still in its bringing together within its limits the most inconsistent peculiarities of other countries. I cannot aptly compare it to any. Descend from the mountains, where you have the scenery and climate of Switzerland, to seek the sky of your choice among the many climates of Italy, and you may find, welling out of the same hills, the Freezing Springs of Mexico and the Hot Springs of Iceland, both together coursing their way to the Salt Sea of Palestine in the plain below. The pages of Malte Brun provide me with a less truthful parallel to it than those which describe the happy Valley of Rasselas or the Continent of Balnibarbi. Let me then press on with my history, during the few minutes that remain for me. Only two events have occurred to menace seriously the establishment at Deseret: the first threatened to destroy its crops, the other to break it up altogether. The shores of the Salt Lake are infested by a sort of insect pest, which claims a vile resemblance to the locust of the Syrian Dead Sea. Wingless, dumpy, black, swollen-headed, with bulging eyes in cases like goggles, mounted upon legs of steel wire and clock-spring, and with a general personal appearance that justified the Mormons in comparing him to a cross of the spider on the buffalo, the Deseret cricket comes down from the mountains at a certain season of the year, in voracious and desolating myriads. It was just at this season, that the first crops of the new settlers were in the full glory of their youthful green. The assailants could not be repulsed. The Mormons, after their fashion, prayed and fought, and fought and prayed, but to no purpose. The "Black Philistines" mowed their way even with the ground, leaving it as if touched with an acid or burnt by fire.