GEOLOGY. 279 



ized life could exist in a land where shells are the only cutting instru- 

 ments the plants in all but twenty-nine in number but a single 

 mineral quadrupeds none, with the exception of foreign mice 

 freshwater barely enough for household purposes no streams, nor 

 mountains, nor hills? How much of the poetry and literature of 

 Europe would be intelligible to persons whose ideas had expanded 

 only to the limits of a coral island ; who had never conceived^ of a 

 surface of land above a half a mile in breadth of a slope higher 

 than a beach of a change of seasons beyond a variation in the prev- 

 alence of rains ? What elevation of morals should be expected upon 

 a contracted islet, so readily over-peopled that threatened starvation 

 drives to infanticide, and tends to cultivate the extremest selfishness? 

 Assuredly there is not a more unfavorable place for moral or intellectual 

 development in the wide world than a coral island, with all its beauty 

 of grove and lake. Prof. Jas. D. Dana, Geology of the Exploring 

 Expedition. 



HEIGHT OF MT. WASHINGTON, N. H. 



IN- the report of the Board of Regents of the University of New 

 York, for 1851, Mr. Joel W. Andrews furnishes the results of some 

 careful barometrical measurements, made with a view of determining 

 the height of Mt. Washington, N. H. From these it appears that the 

 elevation from tide-water in the Hudson river, to the White Mountain 

 House, in the town of Carroll, N. H., is 1622.296 feet. 



From the White Mountain House to the summit of Mt. Washing- 

 ton, by way of Mt. Pleasant, the elevation is 4874.322 feet, which 

 sum added to the former, would make the height of Mt. Wash- 

 ington to be 6496.618 feet above tide-water at Albany, as indi- 

 cated by the barometer. It is, therefore, sufficiently ascertained by 

 experiment, that Mt. Washington, in latitude 44 15' N., has a 

 greater elevation than any other mountain summit between the Mis- 

 sissippi and the Atlantic, east and west, or between the Gulf of Mexico 

 and the Gulf of St. Lawrence, north and south. It also appears that 

 the summit of this mountain is within 1000 or 1500 feet of the line 

 of perpetual snow. 



ASCENT OF JIT. ARARAT. 



MT. ARARAT has been ascended for the first time during the past year 

 by a party of Russian and French officers. The height of the moun- 

 tain is 17,000 feet. M. Khanikoff, in a letter read before the British 

 Association, states " that the ascent does not present upon the side 

 attempted any great difficulties; above all, with the ample means 

 which we had at our disposal consisting of cossacks, soldiers, peas- 

 ants, beasts of burden, tents, provisions, and such like. For myself, I 

 remained twenty-four hours on the top ; having maintained an unin- 

 terrupted series of horary observations of the barometer, the ther- 

 mometer, and the psychrometer, to determine the diurnal change in the 

 pressure of the air, the temperature and the humidity, at so consider- 

 able a height. A portion of the party remained upon the summit five 



