Excursion of an Insect Hunter in the Carinthian Highlands. 339 



XXXVII. — Excursion of an Insect Hunter in the Carinthian 

 Highlands. By Dr. Nickerl of Prague*. Communicated 

 by A. H. Haliday, Esq. 



I arrived at Gastein on the 30th of July, and from this, having 

 crossed the fells f of Nassfeld and Mallnitz, I took the road up 

 Moell-dale to Heiligenblut. This village lies on the eastern slope 

 of the fell of the same name, scarcely an hour's walk from the 

 source of the Moell, at an elevation of 4000 feet above the level 

 of the sea, and in its poverty and loneliness presents anything 

 but a cheering picture. The river Moell, which takes its rise 

 from beneath the glacier that lies on the eastern side of the 

 Grossglockner, five hours' distance from Heiligenblut, receives in 

 its course many little mountain-torrents, and waters the valley 

 which bears its name, and which, running in a direction from the 

 north towards the south-west, opens a succession of romantic 

 scenery. The banks of the stream, for the space of a league 

 from its source, are overgrown with alder bushes, through which 

 the path to Heiligenblut leads. Ridges of rock, of the most 

 grotesque forms, from 7000 to 8000 feet in height, bound the 

 valley on the west. These, inaccessible to the foot of man on 

 their eastern face towards the valley, are wooded here and there 

 with fir-trees, beech and larches; and a charming waterfall, named 

 from an old legend, of which it was the scene, the "Maiden's-leap," 

 arrests the gaze of the visitor. On the mountain slopes to the 

 east of the valley, tillage and grass-fields alternate with insulated 

 tracts of woodland, and the homely cottages of the mountaineers 

 scattered in the intervals. The head of the valley is barely a 

 quarter of a league across, but gradually it widens, and cultiva- 

 tion appears more and more, as the mountains which inclose it 

 diminish in elevation. 



The most interesting of all the excursions in the environs is to 

 the Pasterze, and, by way of this, to the Gems-grube, which lies 

 above Heiligenblut, five leagues to the northward. This spot, to 

 the botanist a classical locality, where the rarest alpine plants are 

 found in the greatest variety, is not less attractive to the ento- 

 mologist, as the extent of the annexed list testifies. The path to 

 it leads over the first (or lower) Sattel, and winds upwards athwart 

 the face of the mountain. After an easy ascent for an hour among 

 fir-trees, larches, and fragments of rock completely clothed with 

 the most elegant mosses, the terrace of the first mountain-range 

 is attained, on which a number of the dairymen's huts are seated 

 between woods and cattle- walks. Here Doritis Apollo was not 



* From the Journal of the Entomological Society of Stettin, 1845. 



t " Tauern," provincial term, subalpine ranges on which the snow melts. 



2B2 



