628 TRAVEL IN EUROPE AND AMERICA. [1872, 
next morning. Speeches were made on the summit, 
and resolutions passed to confirm the names Gray’s 
and Torrey’s peaks given in 1862 by Dr. Parry, who 
was himself happily with the party. The ascent is 
not as difficult as in most mountains of that height, as 
one can ride on horseback to the top in August, when 
the snow lies only in patches; the trail is mostly over 
the rough shale, and for a month or two the summit, 
though over 14,000 feet, is almost bare. The view of 
the innumerable peaks is very magnificent. 
At Dubuque he was the guest of an old Fairfield 
comrade. As the retiring president of the American 
Association he gave his address,! written mostly in 
the cars on the long overland journey, in which he 
explained still further some of his long-meditated 
conclusions on the distribution of the flora of West- 
ern North America. 
TO R. W. CHURCH. 
CAMBRIDGE, October, 1872. 
My prAR CuurcH, —I promised to myself, if I 
did not to you, that I would write you from the other 
side of this continent ; but writing and journeying are 
incompatible, at least in case where the time for the 
one is too short for your undertakings. But now we 
have been a month at home, and more; the accumu- 
lation of things to be seen to is worked off or nearly, 
and I mean now to tell you something of our sum- 
mer’s doings. 
$ soon as we were free we set out... . At Chi- 
cago we had two nights and a day in which to see 
the desolated and fast rebuilding town. From this 
1 “Sequoia and its History; the Relations of North American to 
or east Asian and to Tertiary Vegetation,” in Darwiniana, pp. 209- 
