146 BOTANICAL INFORMATION. 
everything has to be done, and the great sacrifices of money one 
has to make, appear to me to exceed the value of the collections 
obtained. A Russian naturalist, Mr. Bornasensky, has been tra- 
velling for the last three years in Kamtschatka. He. did not col- 
lect in Botany, but has brought together an immense mass of zoological 
objects for the Imperial Museum of St. Petersburg. I regret not to 
have seen him, as he would have been able to give me a great deal of 
information about the interior. During our first visit, he was at some 
inland place, and when we called in for the second time, he had sailed 
for Europe. 
Our stay in Awatscha Bay was short. On the 14th of August we 
set sail, and reached Norton Sound, North-west America, on the 2nd 
of September. The motives for going to that place were to obtain an 
interpreter for the Esquimaux language, in Kotzebue Sound. The 
business being urgent, and the weather very boisterous, only one boat 
went to the Fort of St. Michael. I had no opportunity to land; and 
the few plants occurring in the Herbarium I owe to the kindness of 
Captain Kellett to whom they were brought off. 
On the morning of the 4th of September, the voyage was resumed, 
and on leaving the Sound I perceived, through the telescope, large 
groves of Coniferous trees. After an exciting passage through 
Behring’s Straits, in which we encountered thick fogs, we anchored on 
the 14th of the same month off Chamisso Island, in Kotzebue Sound. 
Here the arctic winter was fast approaching, all the Esquimaux had 
left, and several severe night-frosts had already destroyed the tender 
herbaceous vegetation, leaving only the hardier children of Flora, the 
ichens, Mosses, and Evergreens, to the disappointed collector. 
ere is a striking difference between the vegetation of Awatscha 
Bay, and that of Kotzebue Sound. Trees no longer adorn the soil : 
all ligneous species are low and dwarfy. The Betula incana of Kamt- 
schatka, there a noble tree, is here transformed into low bushes. The 
Salices have sought shelter on the slope of hills having a southern 
aspect, where also the greater part of the herbaceous vegetation abounds. 
There is nothing interesting in such a landscape, nothing to arrest the 
eye, nothing to interrupt the monotony of the scene: a grey peaty 
surface covers hill and dale. Betula nana, Sedum palustre, Arctosta- 
phylos alpina, Andromeda polifolia, and Vaccinium uliginosum, hardly 
raise their heads above the surrounding lichens and mosses. The 
