﻿220 VEGETATION. July, 



day, some of them being fully two hundred feet 

 above the river. In this neighbourhood, the drift 

 timber showed that the spring accumulations, at 

 the disruption of the ice, occasionally raises the 

 river at least forty feet. Here, as Avell as higher 

 up, there is generally a capping of diluvium, with 

 boulders, which roll down and line the beach. 

 Among these, sandstones predominate ; but there 

 are many of a beautiful porphyritic granite, and 

 others of sienite, hornblendic rocks, greenstone, &c. 

 No clay-slate nor mica-slate boulders were observed. 

 Vegetation here preserves the same general cha- 

 racter that it has higher up the river. Salix 

 speciosa continues to grow twenty feet high in 

 favourable localities ; the humbler Salix myrsinites 

 skirts stony rivulets ; and the Salix longifolia 

 covers the flooded sandbanks, and arrests the mud. 

 The Hedysarum horeale furnishes long flexible 

 roots, which taste sweet like the liquorice, and are 

 much eaten in the spring by the natives, but become 

 woody and lose their juiciness and crispness as the 

 season advances. The root of the hoary, decum- 

 bent, and less elegant, but larger-flowered He- 

 dysarum Machenzii is poisonous, and nearly killed 

 an old Indian woman at Fort Simpson, who had 

 mistaken it for that of the preceding species. 

 Fortunately, it proved emetic ; and her stomach 

 having rejected all that she had swallowed, she 



