954 Remarks on the Snoiv Line in the Himalaya. [Sept. 



Remarks on the Snow Line in the Himalaya. — By Captain Thomas 



Hutton. 



In the Journal of the Asiatic Society, No. 202, for April 1849, are 

 some remarks on the snow line in the Himalaya, from the pen of Lt. 

 R. Strachey of the Engineers, wherein he endeavours to prove that 

 the observations some years since made by myself and others in the 

 northern tracts of the Western mountains, are erroneous.— [As it ap- 

 pears to me that this gentleman has actually left the question where he 

 found it, I might have been induced to pass by his remarks without 

 notice, had he not in the excitement of an imaginary triumph, 'thought 

 proper to indulge in a somewhat satirical tone of condemnation]. 



That Lt. Strachey, after three or four years of scientific researches, 

 has at length been enabled fully to corroborate the previous observations 

 of Webb and others in Kumaon, there is no denying, — but as the 

 truth of those observations when applied to that neighbourhood, was 

 never called in question, there appears to have been a waste of time 

 and ingenuity on a laborious endeavour to prove that which was already 

 admitted to be an established fact. — Webb, Hodgson, Colebrooke and 

 the Gerards, are each and all reviewed and in some measure found 

 wanting, and pronounced to be ignorant alike of the true meaning of 

 "the snow line," — and of the nature of "a glacier;" — shall I then 

 desire a better fate than to be condemned in the company of such 

 arrant ignoramuses ? 



Had Lt. Strachey evinced more real anxiety to ascertain and esta- 

 blish, — not a local,— but the general truth, — and less proneness to 

 indulge in censure, he might have gathered from my letters in the 

 Calcutta Journal of Natural History, that no attempt was made either 

 by me or by those gentlemen whose opinions and observations corro- 

 borated mine, — to refute the facts which Webb and others had observ- 

 ed in Kumaon, but that on the contrary while we admitted those facts 

 to be true, we still thought we saw reason to conclude from what had 

 been witnessed in other parts of the mountains, that they could be re- 

 garded only as locally and not generally true. 



With regard then to the actual point in dispute, Lt. Strachey has 

 done nothing ; — for to prove that his imaginary opponents were wrong, 

 he would have collected his data from the districts in which their ob- 



