446 



SCIENCE. 



[Vol. V., No. 121. 



to group as far as we can, and observe what happens ; 

 though, as we are men, and not fishes, something 

 more may fairly be expected of our intelligence than 

 of theirs. 



We will not only guess, but measure and reason ; 

 and in particular we will first, while still at the bot- 

 tom of the mountain, draw the light and heat out 

 into a spectrum, and analyze every part of it by some 

 method that will enable us to explore the invisible, as 

 well as record the visible. Then we will ascend many 

 miles into the air, meeting the rays on the way down, 

 before the sifting process has done its whole work, 

 and there analyze the light all over again, so as to be 

 able to learn the different proportions in which the 

 different rays have been absorbed, and, by studying 

 the action on each separate ray, to prove the state of 

 things which must have existed before this sifting — 

 this selective absorption — began. 



It may seem at first that we cannot ascend far 

 enough to do much good, since the surface of our 

 aerial ocean is hundreds of miles overhead; but we 

 must remember that the air grows thinner as we as- 

 cend, the lower atmosphere being so much denser 

 that about one-half the whole substance or mass of it 

 lies within the first four miles, which is a less height 

 than the tops of some mountains. Every high moun- 

 tain, however, will not do: for ours must not only 

 be very high, but very steep ; so that the station we 

 choose at the bottom may be almost under the station 

 we are afterwards to occupy at the top. Besides, we 

 are not going to climb a lofty, lonely summit, like 

 tourists, to spend an hour, but to spend weeks; so 

 that we must have fire and shelter, and, above all, we 

 must have dry air to get clear skies. First I thought 

 of the Peak of Teneriffe; but afterwards some point 

 in the territories of the United States seemed prefer- 

 able, particularly as the government offered to give 

 the expedition, through the signal-service, and under 

 the direction of its head, Gen. Hazen, material help 

 in transportation, and a military escort, if needed, 

 anywhere in its own dominions. No summit in the 

 eastern part of the United States rises much over 

 seven thousand feet, and, though the great Rocky 

 Mountains reach double this, their tops are the home 

 of fog and mist; so that the desired conditions, if met 

 at all, could only be found on the other side of the 

 continent, in southern California, where the sum- 

 mits of the Sierra Nevadas rise precipitously out of 

 the dry air of the great wastes in lonely peaks, which 

 look eastward down from a height of nearly fifteen 

 thousand feet upon the desert lands. 



This remote region was, at the time I speak of, 

 almost unexplored ; and its highest peak, Mount Whit- 

 ney, had been but once or twice ascended, but was 

 represented to be all we desired, could we once climb 

 it. As there was great doubt whether our apparatus, 

 weighing several thousand pounds, could possibly be 

 taken to the top, and we had to travel three thousand 

 miles even to get where the chief difficulties would be- 

 gin, and make a desert journey of a hundred and fifty 

 miles after leaving the cars, it may be asked why we 

 committed ourselves to such an immense journey, to 

 face such unknown risks of failure. The answer 



must be, that mountains of easy ascent, and fifteen 

 thousand feet high, are not to be found at our doors, 

 and that these- risks were involved in the nature of 

 our novel experiment; so that we started out from no 

 love of mere adventure, but from necessity, much 

 into the unknown. The liberality of a citizen of 

 Pittsburgh, to whose encouragement the enterprise 

 was due, had furnished the costly and delicate appa- 

 ratus for the expedition; and that of the transconti- 

 nental railroads enabled us to take this precious 

 freight along in a private car, which carried a kitchen, 

 a steward, a cook, and an ample larder besides. 



In this we crossed the entire continent from ocean 

 to ocean, stopped at San Francisco for the military 

 escort, went three hundred miles south so as to get 

 below the mountains, and then turned eastward again 

 on to the desert, with the Sierras to the north of us, 

 after a journey which would have been unalloyed 

 pleasure except for the anticipation of what was com- 

 ing as soon as we left our car. I do not, indeed, know 

 that one feels the triumphs of civilization over the 

 opposing forces of nature anywhere more than in 

 the sharp contrasts which the marvellous luxury of 

 recent railroad accommodation gives to the life of the 

 desert. When one is in the centre of one of the great 

 barren regions of the globe, and, after looking out 

 from the windows of the flying train on its scorched 

 wastes for lonely leagues of habitless desolation, turns 

 to his well-furnished dinner-table, and the fruit and 

 ices of his dessert, he need not envy the heroes of ori- 

 ental story who were carried across dreadful solitudes 

 in a single night on the backs of flying genii. Ours 

 brought us over three thousand miles to the Mojave 

 desert. It was growing hotter and hotter when the 

 train stopped in the midst of vast sand-wastes a little 

 after midnight. Roused from our sleep, we stepped 

 on to the brown sand, and saw our luxurious car roll 

 away in the distance, experiencing a transition from 

 the conditions of civilization to those almost of bar- 

 barism, as sharp as could well be imagined. We 

 commenced our slow toil northward with a thermom- 

 eter at 110° in the shade, if any shade there be in the 

 shadeless desert, which seemed to be chiefly inhabited 

 by rattlesnakes of an ashen gray color and a pecul- 

 iarly venomous bite. There is no water save at the 

 rarest intervals; and the soil at a distance seems as 

 though strewed with sheets of salt, which aids the 

 delusive show of the mirage. These are, in fact, the 

 ancient beds of dried-up salt lakes or dead seas, some 

 of them being below the level of the ocean; and such 

 a one on our right, though only about twenty miles 

 wide, has earned the name of ' Death Valley,' from 

 the number of human beings who have perished in it. 

 Formerly an emigrant-train, when emigrants crossed 

 the continent in caravans, had passed through the 

 great Arizona deserts in safety, until, after their half- 

 year's journey, their eyes were gladdened by the 

 snowy peaks of the Sierras looking delusively near. 

 The goal of their long toil seemed before them : only 

 this one more valley lay between ; and into this they 

 descended, thinking to cross it in a day, but they 

 never crossed it. Afterwards the long line of wagons 

 was found, with the skeletons of the animals in the 



