212 AMERICA : GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION 



me of Berkeley a little. He took us about the streets of 

 New York for the two hours we spent there, which city did 

 not delight me. It is just like Liverpool. The sea, islands, 

 and shipping, and especially the gigantic Ferry and coasting 

 steamers all white, with Saloons piled one over another, 

 and paddles 40 ft. diam., are all extraordinary sights. 



Thence we took rail via Philadelphia to Cincinnati, 

 where we staid a night, and then on, sleeping in Pullman 

 cars, to St. Louis, where I saw a great deal of Engelmann, 

 who is still hot on Pines, Oaks, Yuccas, and Euphorbias. 

 It is astonishing what a lot of information one picks up of 

 trees and shrubs, especially in travelling with such a man 

 as Gray, and both at Cincinnati and St. Louis (and with 

 Sargent at Boston) I saw much of the native tree- and 

 shrub-floras East of the Mississippi. The number of asso- 

 ciated trees struck me as most curious ; a few yards walk 

 in the forest would introduce you to perhaps 20 different 

 forest trees and of more than half as many genera. 



The Herbaceous Flora, and especially the Compositae, 

 were equally numerous. I visited several Gentlemen's 

 seats, where the native trees were carefully preserved and 

 replanted. 



From St. Louis West was over the gradually ascending, 

 weary prairies with Helianthus rampant, also here and 

 there the Compass plant with its leaves in a vertical plane 

 N. and S. tolerably conspicuously. Of the many big yellow- 

 flowered Compos, some certainly open towards the sun, 

 but do not appear to me to follow it ; they wriggle about 

 afterwards according to the wind or their own inclinations. 



Buffalo and savages are all gone from the prairie on our 

 line of rail which was South of the main one and struck the 

 State of Colorado about the middle, at Pueblo, whence we 

 went into the Mts. by the cafion of the Arkansas. The 

 R. Mts. are not a range of Mts., but a multitude of rocky 

 ridges rising to 12 and 14,000 ft. over a huge elevated pro- 

 tuberance some 300 miles broad. Their ridges are rocky 

 and rather bare except of Pines and Aspen. They are 

 usually craggy and sparkled with snow patches (not perpetual 

 except in hollows). Between these ridges are vast open 

 downs 6-9000 ft. above the sea, with grass and herbs but 

 few or no trees. The Forest Zone extends to and above 



