432 ALPINE AND ARCTIC PLANTS 



through all Arctic North America to the Rocky Mountains, 

 and is perhaps identical with the C. Sibirica of Northern Asia 

 and the C. pallida of Northern Europe. Large beds of it were 

 covered with their pale yellow blossoms on the precipitous 

 banks overhanging the head of the ravine. With the painted 

 cup, and here alone, was another beautiful species of a very 

 different order, the northern green orchis (Platanthera hyper- 

 borea), a plant which occurs, though rarely, in Canada, but is 

 more abundant to the northward. Here also occurred Peck's 

 geum (G. radiatum, var.\ Arnica mollis, and several other in- 

 teresting plants. 



Of the alpine plants which descend into the ravine, the most 

 interesting was the Greenland sandwort (Arenaria (Alsine) 

 Groenlandica) which was blooming abundantly, with its clusters 

 of delicate white flowers, on the very summit of the mountain, 

 and could be found here and there by the side of the brook in 

 the bottom of the ravine. 



Clambering by a steep and dangerous path up the right side 

 of the ravine, we reach almost at once the limit, beyond 

 which the ordinary flora of New England can extend no longer, 

 and are in the presence of a new group of plants comparable with 

 those of Labrador and Greenland. Here, on the plateau of the 

 Lake of the Clouds, the traveller who has ascended the giddy 

 precipices overhanging Tuckerman's Ravine is glad to pause, that 

 he may contemplate the features of the new region which he 

 has reached. We have left the snow behind us, except a small 

 patch which lingers on the shady side of Mount Munro; for 

 it is only in the ravines into which it has drifted a hundred 

 feet deep or more, that it can withstand the summer heat until 

 August. We stand on a dreary waste of hard angular blocks of 

 mica slate and gneiss that lie in rude ridges, as if they had been 

 roughly raked up by Titans, who might have been trying to pile 

 Monro upon Washington, but which seem to be merely the 

 remains of the original outcropping edges of the rocks broken up 



