248 



Sierra Club Bulletin. 



A Magnificent Gift. 

 Mrs. E. H. Harriman has given to the State of New York a 

 tract of ten thousand acres of land and one million dollars cash 

 for its improvement. And this magnificent gift, it is said, is ac- 

 companied by another of $1,625,000 from seventeen patriotic 

 men and women of New York City to be used in purchasing 

 adjoining land. "The intention," says William Eleroy Curtis, in 

 the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social 

 Science, "is to make a park sixty miles long, varying from twelve 

 hundred feet to twelve miles wide, upon the rim of the Palisades 

 and along the west bank of the Hudson River from the boundary 

 line of New Jersey to the city of Newburg, above West Point. 

 It is understood also that the family of the late Abram S. Hewitt 

 intend to make a similar gift of eight or ten thousand acres south 

 of the boundary to the State of New Jersey, provided the legis- 

 lature of that State makes an appropriation for its care and 

 improvement. When this scheme is completed it will be in sev- 

 eral respects the most notable playground in the world, em- 

 bracing a total area of 45,000 acres along the bank of a great 

 thoroughfare and immediately accessible to three or four million 

 people." J. M. 



San Francisco, May 25, 1910. 



Mr. William E. Colby, 



Secretary, Sierra Club, San Francisco, Cal. 



Dear Mr. Colby : — I received to-day a telegram from Mr. G. F. 

 Marsh, of Lone Pine, saying that he climbed Mount Whitney and 

 reached the summit yesterday and found our instruments left 

 there last August all right. He gives the lowest temperature on 

 the top of the United States proper last winter as 23° below zero 

 and the highest, 57°. There is very little snow in the mountains ; 

 about the same amount now as on the first of July last year. It 

 is quite an achievement to reach the summit so early in the year. 



There is an interesting sequence connected with this question 

 of getting the temperature on the top of the Sierra. You may 

 remember that Professor Le Conte and other members of the 

 Sierra Club left thermometers on Mount Lyell in the summer of 

 1898 and we obtained a record of — 17° as the lowest. Subse- 

 quently we tried to get the instruments to the summit of Whitney 

 and the outcome of it was that Prof. J. E. Church, Jr., estabHshed 

 an observatory on Mount Rose. Last year, as you know, through 

 the aid of the Smithsonian Institution, a small building was built 

 on Mount Whitney. Do we not seem to be making progress in 

 the conquest of the Sierra? Sincerely, 



Alexander G. McAdie, 

 Professor. 



