562 ORNITHOLOGICAL SKETCHES 
All high mountains have certain common characteristics, 
and so the Retyezat may perhaps remind travellers of the Alps; 
yet in many respects one might call it a blending of the 
Central-Huropean Alps, the Balkans, the mountains of the 
Karst, and in its lower parts also of the Hungarian Carpa- 
thians, while in some of its deep glens, whose lofty sides are 
clothed with deciduous woods up to a great height, I found a 
resemblance and often even an exact likeness to the mountains 
of the north-west provinces of Spain, and to those of no other 
range that I have ever visited. 
The hills of this chain also exhibit many evidences of their 
southerly position and their connection with the great group 
of the South-European highlands. This struck me most 
forcibly in the distribution of the vegetation. The zone of 
the oaks reaches a long way up, even on to the steep heights. 
Then come regular woods of birches mixed with Scotch firs, 
and succeeded by enormous beech-forests, which give place to 
white and common spruces. Not until these have attained their 
limit does the Siberian cedar appear in conjunction with a 
few creeping pines, and where trees of a high habit of growth 
are no longer found there extend the great regions of the 
cliffs, the bare stony slopes, and the impenetrable thickets 
of creeping pine with, singularly enough, a sprinkling of 
juniper bushes. All these zones, too, are not narrow belts, 
but broad virgin forests; and these mountains are not subject 
to the rules which apply to the northern Alps, such as 
those of North Styria and Upper Austria, for at the elevation 
where the poor scattered spruces of the latter tail off among 
the creeping pines there are in the Transylvanian Alps the 
most luxuriant oak-woods, and instead of the bare rocks 
and nothing else which confront the traveller at about 4000 
teet, we here have forests of beech and a growth of spruces 
reaching as high as 6000 to 7000 feet. This is indicative of a 
southerly position, for where the woods are not destroyed 
