LICHENS. 187 
certainty, that for so many long years hung over 
the fate of Franklin and his heroic comrades, was 
at last dispelled by the discovery, during M‘Clin- 
tock’s search, of a large cairn at Cape Victoria, in 
King William Land, containing, among other 
mournfully interesting relics, a journal of one of 
the officers of the lost expedition, announcing the 
intelligence of the certain death of its leader on 
the 11th of June 1847. <A short distance beyond 
this fatal point, two human skeletons were found 
in the bottom of an abandoned boat, with no food 
beside them except some tea, chocolate and tripe 
de roche, on which miserable and innutritious diet 
they lingered out their existence in these frightful 
solitudes, till death mercifully put an end to their 
sufferings. 
The tripe de roche consists of various species 
of Gyrophora—black, leather-like lichens, studded 
with small black points like coiled wire buttons, 
and attached by an umbilical root, or by short 
strong fibres to rocks on the mountains. Some 
of them bear no unapt resemblance to a piece of 
shagreen ; while others appear corroded, like a 
fragment of burnt skin, as if the rock on which 
they grew had been subjected to the action of 
fire. They are found in cold exposed situations 
on Alpine rocks of granite or micaceous schist, in 
almost all parts of the world—on the Himalayas 
