1848.] The Turaee and Outer Mountains of Kumaoon. 421 



too happy to find any roads at all. In sober truth, the resources of 

 the mountains are not many, and are already as much developed as the 

 nature of the country will admit of. Consequent on the cost of tran- 

 sport, the timber, tar, iron, hemp, madder, &c, cannot at any remune- 

 rating price, come into competition with the water-borne articles of 

 Europe, and other maritime lands ; or the supply already equals the 

 demand. The soil, except in the low vallies where the European colonist 

 cannot exist, is generally poor, besides being pre-occupied, and often 

 exhausted, by the aboriginal population. Of the feelings with which 

 these would regard any extensive immigration of agricultural Europeans, 

 we may judge by the dissatisfaction with which they relinquished the 

 comparatively trifling lands required for the Tea plantations. The fine 

 tracts of rich meadow, which flank the Snowy Range, are too remote for 

 settlers, and are too high and too cold to ripen grain. 



Then as Russia has been termed a despotism tempered by assassina- 

 tion, so the Himalayan climate is a tropical one tempered by thunder- 

 storms. It is certainly less salubrious than is commonly supposed, and 

 seldom so cool as to admit of European out-door labour. Everywhere 

 we encounter miserably diseased objects amongst the natives — much to 

 be ascribed to filthy habits, no doubt : — and up to 5500 or 6000 feet, 

 the amount of sickness amongst Europeans, though not of a serious 

 description, is considerable, and of a nature which singularly indisposes 

 and unfits the subject for occupation. Such, too, is the power of the 

 sun at all elevations, from April till October, between 9 a.m. and 4 

 p. m. that Europeans can rarely with impunity brave its rays.* The 

 mean annual temperature at 7500 feet elevation is nearly that of Lon- 



* On this point, Professor Forbes furnishes us with some results very instructive to 

 those who think that by escaping to the Himalaya, they also escape the Indian sun, (sup- 

 plementary Report on Meteorology, in the Report of the British Association for 1840.) 



" Saussure seems first to have thought of comparing directly the intensity of solar heat 

 at the top aud bottom of a mountain : * * * * and, by experiments on the Cramont, to 

 the south of Mont Blanc, he actually proved the increased intensity of the solar rays as 

 we ascend, notwithstanding the diminution of temperature." The Professor himself, by 

 *' comparative experiments at the top and bottom of a column of air 6500 feet high, of 

 known density, temperature, and humidity, under the most unexceptionable circum- 

 stances in point of weather" found the loss of solar heat vertically traversing the atmo- 

 sphere to amount, at the level of the sea, to 29 per cent. : " a near agreement with the 32 

 per cent, independently determined by the method of Bouguer and Lambert with the same 



3 M 



