54 STEPPES AND DESERTS. 



perhaps, like the butterflies seen by me, also among perpetual snow, 

 but in much more elevated regions in the Andes of Peru, they had 

 been carried thither involuntarily by ascending currents of air. I 

 have seen in the Pacific, at a great distance from the coast, large 

 winged lepidopterous insects fall on the deck of the ship, having, no 

 doubt, been carried far out to sea by land winds. 



Fremont's map and geographical investigations comprehend the 

 extensive region from the junction of the Kanzas River with the 

 Missouri, to the falls of the Columbia and to the missions of Santa 

 Barbara and Pueblo de los Angeles in New California ; or a space 

 of 28 degrees of longitude, and from the 34th to the 45th parallel of 

 latitude. Four hundred points have been determined hypsometri- 

 cally by barometric observations, and, for the most part, geographi- 

 cally by astronomical observations; so that a district which, with 

 the windings of the route, amounts to 3600 geographical miles, 

 from the mouth of the Kanzas to Fort Vancouver and the shores of 

 the Pacific (almost 720 miles more than the distance from Madrid 

 to Tobolsk), has been represented in profile, showing the relative 

 heights above the level of the sea. As I was, I believe, the first 

 person who undertook to represent, in geognostic profile, the form 

 of entire countries such as the Iberian peninsula, the highlands 

 of Mexico, and the Cordilleras of South America, (the semi-per- 

 spective projections of a Siberian traveller, the Abbe Chappe, were 

 founded on mere and generally ill-judged estimations of the fall of 

 rivers) it has given me peculiar pleasure to see the graphical 

 method of representing the form of the earth in a vertical direction, 

 or the elevations of the solid portions of our planet above its watery 

 covering, applied on so grand a scale as has .been done in Fremont's 

 map. In the middle latitudes of 37 to 43, the Rocky Mountains 

 present, besides the higher snowy summits comparable with the Peak 

 of Tenerifie in elevation, lofty plains -of an extent hardly met with 

 elsewhere on the surface of the earth, and almost twice as extensive, 

 in an east and west direction, as that of the Mexican plateaux, 

 From the group of mountains, which commences a little to the 

 west of Fort Laramie, to beyond the Wahsatch mountains, there 

 is an uninterrupted swelling of the ground from 5300 to 7400 

 English feet above the level of the sea. A similar elevation may 



