82 Canadian Record of Science. 
By physical geography, I mean, here, the way in which the 
seas, mountains and plains of a sufficiently large district 
are disposed towards each other; and it is due to the close 
relation existing between these diversities of surface and cli- 
mate, that the latter is not a whimsical thing, but one of the 
steadiest and most characteristic features of any region— 
even though the weather there may, at certain seasons, be 
most Capricious. 
The Canadian West I take to mean, for the purposes of 
this lecture, all of north-eastern America, from the limits of 
the forests around Hudson’s Bay and Lake Superior, west- 
ward to the Pacific Ocean. 
A glance at the map is the first thing in order. . 
We find that north of the International boundary line— 
or, better, let us say north of the watershed between Can- 
adian rivers and those tributary to the Mississippi and the 
Missouri—there is an immense area of treeless plains 
nearly a thousand miles wide east and west, and stretching 
north-west, in triangular form, to the border of Alaska. 
This may be said to be one climatic area, which we may call 
that of the Plains. 
West of the Plains stand the serried ranks of the grand 
old Rockies, forming a belt of snow-bearing mountains 
averaging 200 miles in breadth, and rising everywhere into 
tne zone of perpetual snow and ice. This belt has a 
climate of its own, which we may term that of the Rocky 
Mountains. Beyond this lies the interior basin of British 
Columbia, about as large as Manitoba, forming a third 
climatic area, which may be named the Kamloops Climate, 
for want of a better term. A fourth climate, that of the 
rainy Coast Range, is attached to the narrow but lofty rank 
of mountains improperly called the Cascades, which extend 
parallel with the Pacific coastin southern British Columbia, 
and form the coast itself in the northern part of that Pro- 
vince. Last of all, there is the strip of lowland and the 
tongue-like valleys along the coast itself, together with the 
islands bordering it, which constitute a fifth climatic area. 
Hach of these divisions is, in fact, a long strip of country, 
