152 Annals of the Philosophical Club 



are broad, open, and shallow, surrounded by bare rounded 

 heights of broken rock, without precipices or peaks, though 

 the summits in one part rose above the average height of 

 the range (about 6000 feet) to fully 9000 feet. The bottoms 

 of the valleys become, lower down, narrow and terraced. 

 Above 5000 feet they are very barren, below this level 

 brushwood is abundant. No glaciers or permanent snow- 

 fields now exist, and there is little water in the higher parts, 

 for that from the melted snow (of which much falls till about 

 May) disappears down conical depressions from five to 

 twenty feet in depth. Moraines only occur in the broad 

 flat heads of the valleys, at from 6000 to 7000 feet. But 

 these are quite typical, rising abruptly from flat-floored 

 valleys in long continuous masses of debris, and the cedars 

 (now about 400 in number) occupy five or six of them in 

 close contiguity. None of the trees seemed less than forty 

 years old (for drought kills all the seedlings) ; the more aged 

 may perhaps have lived 500 years. 1 



Colonel Sykes drew attention to the gale of Oct. 2nd, 

 In the morning the barometer stood about 30 inches ; it 

 fell i.i inch before 9 p.m., and began to rise before midnight. 

 The wind, which had been strong all day, then increased 

 to a hurricane, which lasted till 9 a.m. on the 3rd, by which 

 time the barometer had returned to 30 inches. 



Dec. 20th, I25th meeting. Dr. Carpenter gave an outline 

 of the results obtained by Dr. Wallich, 2 who had accom- 

 panied, as naturalist, Captain Sir Leopold M'Clintock in 

 H.M.S. Bulldog on her sounding expedition (in view of 

 laying a sub-Atlantic telegraph) to Iceland, Greenland, and 

 Newfoundland. Former deep-sea soundings had proved 

 the tests of Globigerina to be abundant on the sea-bottom 

 at more than 1000 fathoms depth, but it was uncertain 

 whether the animals habitually lived so far beneath the 



1 For an account of these and other surviving groups of cedars in the 

 Lebanon, see H. B. Tristram, Land oj Israel, pages 623-632. 



a George Charles Wallich (1815-1899), M.D. Edinburgh, after service 

 as an army surgeon in India, returned to England. The results of the 

 above-mentioned voyage were published in his important work, The North 

 Atlantic Sea-bed (1862). 



