108 LACHOONG VALLEY. Chap. XXIL 



rhododendrons and maples ; with Enkianthus, Pyrns, 

 cherry, Pieris, laurel, and GougMa. The musk-deer 

 inhabits these woods, and at this season I have never seen 

 it higher. Large monkeys are also found on the skirts of 

 the pine-forests, and the Ailurus ochraceus (Hodgs.), a 

 curious long-tailed animal peculiar to the Himalaya, some- 

 thing between a diminutive bear and a squirrel. In the 

 dense and gigantic forest of Abies Brunoniana and silver 

 fir, I measured one of the former trees, and found it 

 twenty-eight feet in girth, and above 120 feet in height. 

 The Abies Webbiana attains thirty-five feet in girth, with a 

 trunk unbranched for forty feet. 



The path was narrow and difficult in the wood, and 

 especially along the bed of the stream, where grew ugly trees 

 of larch, eighty feet high, and abundance of a new species 

 of alpine strawberry with oblong fruit. At 11,560 feet 

 elevation, I arrived at an immense rock of gneiss, buried in 

 the forest. Here currant-bushes were plentiful, generally 

 growing on the pine-trunks, in strange association with a 

 small species of Begonia, a hothouse tribe of plants in 

 England. Emerging from the forest, vast old moraines 

 are crossed, in a shallow mountain valley, several miles 

 long and broad, 12,000 feet above the sea, choked with 

 rhododendron shrubs, and nearly encircled by snowy 

 mountains. Magnificent gentians grew here, also Senecio, 

 Corgdalis, and the Aconitum lurid urn (n. sp.), whose root is 

 said to be as virulent as A. ferox and A. Napellus* The 



a scandent species, Berberry, Deuizia, Philadelphia, Rose, Honeysuckle, Thistles, 

 Orchis, Habenaria, Fritillaria, Aster, Calimeris, Verbascum thapsus, Pedicularis, 

 Euphrasia, Senecio, Eupatorium, Dipsacus, Euphorbia, Balsam, Hypericum, Gentiana, 

 Halenia, Codonoptsis, Polygonum. 



* The result of Dr. Thomson's and my examination of the Himalayan aconites 

 (of which there are seven species) is that the one generally known as A. ferox, and 

 which supplies a great deal of the celebrated poison, is the common A. Napellus 

 of Europe. 



