1895. ] Explorations of Thomas Coulter. 521 
last named country, accepting a position as medical attendant, 
or, as we should say, physician, of the Real del Monte Mining 
Company, under a three years’ contract. 
Coulter sailed from England in August, 1824, and doubt- 
less reached Mexico in the same year, but the recorded de- 
tails of his work there are very meager indeed. Ina chrono- 
metric table given by Coulter in his Notes on Upper Cal- 
ifornia are named certain localities in Mexico at which he 
took observations. The year unfortunately is not given, but 
the localities and partial dates are as follows: 
Zimapan [stateof Hidalgo] . - - - - April 8 to 15. 
Mexico Teityy it OPH eS ee en April 22 to 29. 
R. D. Monte [Real del Monte, an old mining town 
in the state of Hidalgo, situated in the moun- 
tains about fifty miles northeast of the city of 
Mexico]. 2VSE Ube ane Oe Hae ey FeO ne. 
In a meteorological table in the same paper Coulter cites 
from his journal certain temperature observations made, pre- 
sumably by himself, at Veta Grande, a mining pueblo not 
more than ten miles north of the city of Zacatecas, in the 
state of the same name, from December 2, 1825, through the 
month of January following. Coulter, by reason of the de- 
sertion of some of his company’s employees, was compelled to 
act, for more thana year, as superintendent of this important, 
and in his hands productive, mine. cae 
After the termination of his engagement with the mining 
company, Coulter was located for a time at Hermosillo, a 
large town in the state of Sonora, on the river of the same 
name. His reference to this place is as follows: _ 
‘It [sometimes] freezes even to the south of Pitis [Hermo- 
sillo],® in lat. N. 29°; and in the winter of 1829-30, it froze 
in Pitis every night for nearly two months. On the 12th of 
December, on arriving at San Jose, a few leagues from Pitis 
[probably San Jose de Pimas, an old mining pueblo on the 
io Matare about sixty miles southeastward from Hermo- 
sillo], I found the thermometer at 
On the 13th, it stood in the shade below 32° all the day, at 
night sinking even to 18°. This, however, appears to occur 
very rarely.”!° 
.*On the maps of Humboldt and others to as lat 
given variously as Pitic, Petic, and Pitit, 
year the name Hermosillo appears on all the maps, though ti 
etteer these two names are not identified as belonging to t hay 
10Thomas Cculter, Notes on Upper California 69. 1835. 
