NATURALIST IN INDIA. 209 



great banks several hundred feet in thickness, with their 

 water-worn pebbles, sand, and clay, together with erratic 

 boulders here and there, all point to a far-back period in the 

 history of the country, when the glaciers now confined to the 

 most upland hollows stretched down into the valley of Cash- 

 mere. The view looking up the pass is very striking and 

 grand. 



Dense forests of pine clothe the sloping ridges, and stretch 

 far along the windings of the defile. As we are now in the 

 neighbourhood of the Peer Pinjal, I cannot omit a few recol- 

 lections concerning a hunting excursion I made to this district 

 two years after the events here recorded. The journal of my 

 travels in Cashmere on that occasion was unfortunately lost 

 during my absence in Turkey at the close of the Crimean 

 war. I regret the loss the more, as it contained many valu- 

 able natural history notes on the habits of several of the large 

 mammalia of the western mountains. In traversing the forests 

 and mountains of the Futi and Peer Pinjal, one is astonished, 

 after a visit to the northern chains, to find there noble forests 

 without the bara singa, or the numbers of bears he had been 

 accustomed to encounter on the opposite ranges. I could not 

 satisfactorily account for this ; the advantages as regards 

 wood cover and food being the same. This partiality on 

 the part of certain animals to localities is not peculiar to 

 the two just mentioned, for I have often travelled over large 

 tracts of the Himalayas of the most inviting character, 

 and scarcely met with a wild creature of any sort. As a rule, 

 the northern slopes are more devoid of animal existence than 

 the southern, from, possibly, being exposed to the boreal 

 blasts, and their floral characters participate in nearly the 

 same differences. 



The brown and black bears never associate, and when they 



p 



