424 THE CANADIAN NATURALIST. [Vol. ix. 



ruary 1875, and found in a semicircular basin, completely closed 

 in by glaciers and high bare peaks, at an elevation of 5,300 feet. 

 The hardy discoverer, Mr. E. W. Jarvis, travelled in the course 

 of that exploration 900 miles on snow shoes, much of it with 

 the thermometer below the temperature of freezing mercury, and 

 lived for the last three days, as he expressed it, ' on the anticipa- 

 tion of a meal at the journey's end. 



" We are still imperfectly acquainted with the region north of 

 the parallel of 50*^ in British Columbia, where the Canadian 

 engineers have long been searching for a practical railway line 

 from one or other of three known passes of the Rocky Mountains 

 proper through the tremendous gorges of the Cascade Mountains, 

 to the Pacific. These passes are, the Yellowhead, at an eleva- 

 tion of 3,6-45 feet, the Pine river, at 2,800 feet, and the Peace 

 river, said to be only 1,650 feet above the sea, all of them com- 

 paring very favorably in respect to height with the other trans- 

 continental railwiiys. The Union Pacific Railway, for example, 

 runs, as you will remember, for 1,500 miles at elevations of over 

 4,500 feet, and its summit level is 8,242 feet. The Dominion 

 Government has recently adopted a line from the Yellowhead Pass 

 to Burrard Inlet, which may be made out in any good map by fol- 

 lowing the course of the Thompson and Frazer rivers. By this 

 line the Pacific coast will be reached in 1,945 miles from Lake 

 Superior, and it is already partly under contract. This is not a 

 place to enter upon engineering details. I will only remark that 

 greater difficulties have seldom been presented to human enter- 

 prise than must here be conquered. That peculiar feature in 

 physical geography, the canon or deep gorge, of which the Via 

 Mala is an example familiar to many persons, is presented all 

 over the region upon a scale of grandeur unsurpassed. When 

 not perpendicular cliffs, their sides are in these latitudes seamed 

 by avalanches on the largest scale ; while the mountain torrents 

 which rush down them defy navigation. Mr. Jarvis describes 

 how, on one occasion, having walked into a hole concealed by 

 inow, the current caught his snow-shoes, turning them upside 

 down, and held him like a vice, so that it required the united 

 efforts of all his party to extricate him. * * * * 



" The final decision of the Canadian Government to adopt 

 Burrard Inlet for the Pacific terminus of their railway, relegates 

 to the domain of pure geography a great deal of knowledge 

 acquired in exploring other lines : explorations in which Messrs 



