224 
often continuing until midnight or past. This, 
added to their rapidly improvised birchbark 
hats with pictures upon them that would pro- 
hibit their being sent through the mails, does 
not speak well for missionary efforts among 
them. 
On the 11th we crossed the pass (Perrier 
Pass), ascending to forty-one hundred feet 
SCIENCE. 
[Vou. IIL, No. 55. 
hill, on a level, or even with a slight descent, 
always stepped in each other’s tracks, so that 
my large party made a trail that looked as if 
only five or six had passed over; but, when 
going down a steep descent, each one made 
his own trail, and they scattered out over many 
yards. I could not but be impressed with the 
idea that this was worth considering in estimat- 
A VIEW IN THE DAYAY VALLEY. 
A finger of the Saussure Glacier is seen peeping round the mountain, the rest being covered with fog. 
above the sea-level, being among the clouds 
formed by the glaciers in the upper third of the 
ascent. It was the usual severe alpine climb- 
ing; the agility and endurance of the Indian 
packers, with their immense loads, almost sur- 
passing belief. The entire distance of six or 
seven miles was on the deep snow, the depth 
of which could only be inferred. Once through 
the Perrier Pass, the descent is rapid for a few 
hundred feet to a lake of about a hundred acres 
in extent, which was yet frozen over and the ice 
covered with snow. It very much resembled 
some old extinct crater, and I doubt not but 
that it was active in ancient times. Here there 
was no timber, nor even brush, to be seen ; and 
the gullies of the granite hills, and the valleys 
deeply covered with snow, gave the whole scene 
a decidedly arctic appearance. My Indians, in 
following a trail on snow, whether it were up 
ing their numbers under such circumstances. 
From the little crater-like lake at the very head 
of the Yukon, the trail leads northward through 
a valley that converges to a gorge; and while 
on the snow in this we could hear the water 
gcurgling under the snow bridge on which we 
were evidently walking. Farther on, where 
these snow arches were too wide, they had 
tumbled in, showing in many places deep per- 
pendicular snow-banks, oftent wenty to twenty- 
five feet in height. Passing by a few small 
lakes on our left, some yet containing floating 
ice, we caught sight of the main lake late in 
the afternoon, and in a few hours were upon 
its banks. It is a beautiful sheet of water, ten 
or eleven miles in length,’ and looked not un- 
like a limited area of one of the broad inland 
1 Named in honor of Dr. Lindeman of the Bremen geographi- 
cal society. 
‘ 
