April 1829. KATER’s PEAK—BOTANY. 201 
parative facility offered by the water-course, was only impeded 
by loose stones, which frequently yielded to the foot, and 
rolled down the gully, to the great danger of those who fol- 
lowed. The banks of the ravine were saturated with water, and 
covered either with spongy moss, or matted with plants,* which 
afforded no assistance; had it not therefore been for strag- 
gling shrubs of arbutus, or veronica, and tufts of rushes, grow- 
ing on the steeper parts, we should have had many a fall; and 
however unimportant we might think bruises and scratches, 
a broken barometer would have been a serious accident, and 
much care was required to avoid it. We had to leave the 
bed of the torrent, when it became full of wood, and then our 
difficulty increased much; for in many places we had to scramble 
over the thickly-matted and interwoven branches of the stunted 
bushes of beech which frequently yielded to our weight, and 
entangled our legs so much, that it was no easy matter to extri- 
cate ourselves. 
At the height of one thousand feet, vegetation became much 
more stunted ; we found the plants and shrubs of very dimi- 
nutive size, consisting principally of the deciduous-leaved 
beech, one plant of which, though not more than two inches 
high, occupied a space of four or five feet in diameter, its 
spreading branches insinuating themselves among wild cran- 
berry, chamitis, donacia, arbutus, and escalonia, so closely 
matted together, as to form quite an elastic carpet. For the 
last two hundred feet, we walked over the bare rock, on which 
no other vegetation was observed than lichens. The summit of 
the peak is formed by a loose pile of green-stene rock, in which 
the hornblende appears in very varied forms, sometimes in 
large crystals, and again so small and disseminated, as to be 
scarcely visible; on the summit it is seen, in very long, narrow 
(? filiform) crystals, and the feldspar predominating, gives it 
a white appearance.+ 
The only living creatures we saw were a solitary hawk and 
_ * A species of Gunnera (Dysemore integrifolia, Banks and Solander), 
and the green-stemmed Cineraria (Cin. lewcanthema. Banks and So- 
lander), + Nos. 283 to 286, in Geol. Soc. Museum. 
