SECRETARY'S REPORT. 293 



man's supremacy, were wanting in these most savage wastes. 

 They are sheltering roofs to which he drives his flocks, while the 

 smoke curls up from his hearth and his merry song resounds 

 from the rocks. 



The traveller in the Alps knows well the dull melancholy 

 which hangs over the rocky pastures in the fall, when men and 

 herds, horses and dogs, fire, hread and salt have left the heights 

 for the valleys ; when the chalets are deserted and fastened up, 

 and it seems as if the ancient spirit of the mountains had thrown 

 his gloomy mantle over his whole domain. No sound mingles 

 with the rumbling of the glacier, and the dashing of the ice- 

 water for miles around, none but the scream of the hungry 

 bird of prey or the whistle of the marmot as he rushes past. 

 The ground eaten bare, except where a few small patches of 

 untouched grass indicate the presence of poisonous herbs, has 

 lost its pretty hue ; reptiles occupy the drinking troughs, now 

 filled with mud, and some late butterflies flutter about with 

 torn and faded wings, while the melancholy chorus of froo-s 

 seems to mock the herdsman's summer song. 



The wild regions can only be brought under cultivation by 

 means of the peasant's dear cattle, which have a greater influ- 

 ence over the human family directly connected with them, on 

 their fortunes and their habits, than the grandest revolutions of 

 the political world. His cattle are a part of the cowherd's own 

 being, more dear to him than the fields to the farming peasant, 

 or the wares to the merchant. He lives by and with them ; 

 they are his wealth, his happiness, his familiar friends as well 

 as his means of subsistence. If he talks of his " Habe^'' or 

 possessions, he means by it both wife and cattle. 



It is not easy to state the exact vertical extent of the Alpine 

 pastures, as it depends on local circumstances. We may assume, 

 in general, that the soil is ordinarily tilled for meadow land and 

 other purposes as far as four thousand feet above the level of 

 the sea ; in the most fertile parts of the Rhaetian Alps the 

 average rises to about five thousand feet. From this level the 

 Alps, properly so called, begin, those which are used merely for 

 summer pastures. They consist of tracts of grass which are 

 sometimes of extraordinary extent, the pampas of Switzerland, 

 which stretch away as high as the nature of the mountain 

 permits. We can hardly fix the mean upper limit of the Swiss 



