Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 43.djvu/881

Rh the language of birds. The other was Francis of Assisi, who was in some measure the forerunner of Gilbert White. There was a legend that he so loved the birds that they flocked around him while he preached sermons to them. The legend at least showed his love for those creatures and his power of making them love him. These characteristics of Gilbert White could be gathered from his book; but the picture was filled up by the mass of family correspondence which had just come to light. The combination of simplicity and refinement, the absence of ostentation and self-consciousness which constituted the great charm of White's book were equally conspicuous in his family correspondence and in his every-day habits. The Earl of Stamford, who has been collecting reminiscences and unexplored documents connected with his great relative. White, said that years ago an old woman was asked what she remembered of him. She said that he used to walk about the lanes tap-tapping with his cane, and stopping every now and then to brush the dust off his shoes.

Unexplored Mountain Regions.—While many of the mountain districts of the world, hitherto unexplored, have been reached in recent years by scientific mountaineers, yet, excepting Switzerland and the Pyrenees, which have been entirely explored by the different Alpine Clubs, there is no chain of mountains, as Mr. Edwin Swift Balch shows in his essay on Mountain Exploration, which is as yet thoroughly known or perfectly mapped out. New Zealand, though settled and inhabited by Englishmen for many years, had to wait till a few years ago for Mr. Green first to explore its Alps. The Himalayas, although the Indian Government has tried to map and explore them, are still in many cases keeping their secrets until men shall come along who know the science of climbing. Mr. Graham's trip in the Sikkim ranges in 1886 showed conclusively how little was known about the Himalayas, as he has now left us in doubt as to whether the two peaks which he saw from the top of Kabru were not higher than Gaurisankar. In America there is a large field left for mountain exploration. Of the Selkirks we know but little; St. Elias has not been reached; the Alaskan ranges and Mount Fairweather and Mount Cook are believed to be entirely untouched. The Mount Wrangel range is hardly known, even by name, and though it is said to have been measured and to be over twenty thousand feet high, we know practically nothing about it or its surroundings. On the map of the northern Rockies, north of the Selkirks, we find a bunch of peaks, called Mount Brown and Mount Murchison, and marked as being over sixteen thousand feet high. Of these mountains we again are in almost complete ignorance, though from Mr. Green's explorations we may doubt the accuracy of their supposed altitude. In South America the Andes of PeraPeru [sic] and ChiliChile [sic] are mostly still unascended, and even Ecuador has had only one serious exploration, by Mr. Whymper. Here is unexplored mountain country enough to occupy our clubs several years.

Vegetation of American Deserts.—The true sagebrush of the Western desert (Artemisia tridentata), according to Prof. C. Hart Merriam, begins with a solid front along the southern border of the upper Sonoran zone and spreads northward over the Great Basin like a monstrous sheet, covering almost without a break hundreds of thousands of square miles. It is not only the most striking and widely diffused plant of the upper Sonora and transition zones, but as a social plant has few equals, often occupying immense areas to the exclusion of all but the humblest and least conspicuous forms. Wherever one travels in this vast region, the aromatic odor of the sagebrush is always present, and sometimes, particularly after rains, is so powerful as to cause pain in the nostrils. In addition to the sage, many of the desert ranges support a growth of shrubs and small trees rarely if ever found in the intervening deserts and plains, whatever the altitude. The so-called cedar (Juniperus californica utahensis) and the piñon or nut pine (Pimus monophilla) clothe the summits and higher slopes of many of the ranges, forming stunted open forests of much beauty. Mixed with these are scattered clumps of bushes representing a number of genera, most of which bear green foliage and handsome flowers. Some of the desert ranges, as the Funeral Mountains, are too excessively hot and arid to support even these forms of vegetation;