ns lying a thousand miles
farther south.

_OUNALASKA._

To the botanist approaching any portion of the Aleutian chain of
islands from the southward during the winter or spring months, the view
is severely desolate and forbidding. The snow comes down to the water's
edge in solid white, interrupted only by dark outstanding bluffs with
faces too steep for snow to lie on, and by the backs of rounded rocks
and long rugged reefs beaten and overswept by heavy breakers rolling in
from the Pacific, while throughout nearly every month of the year the
higher mountains are wrapped in gloomy dripping storm-clouds.

Nevertheless vegetation here is remarkably close and luxuriant, and
crowded with showy bloom, covering almost every foot of the ground up
to a height of about a thousand feet above the sea--the harsh trachytic
rocks, and even the cindery bases of the craters, as well as the
moraines and rough soil beds outspread on the low portions of the short
narrow valleys.

On the 20th of May we found the showy _Geum glaciale_ already in
flower, also an arctostaphylos and draba, on a slope facing the south,
near the harbor of Ounalaska. The willows, too, were then beginning to
put forth their catkins, while a multitude of green points were
springing up in sheltered spots wherever the snow had vanished. At a
height of 400 and 500 feet, however, winter was still unbroken, with
scarce a memory of the rich bloom of summer.

During a few short excursions along the shores of Ounalaska Harbor and
on two of the adjacent mountains, towards the end of May and beginning
of October we saw about fifty species of flowering plants--empetrum,
vaccinium, bryanthus, pyrola, arctostaphylos, ledum, cassiope, lupinus,
zeranium, epilobium, silene, draba, and saxifraga being the most
telling and characteristic of the genera represented. _Empetrum
nigrum_, a bryanthus, and three species of vaccinium make a grand
display when in flower and show their massed colors at a considerable
distance.

Almost the entire surface of the valleys and hills and lower slopes of
the mountains is covered with a dense spongy plush of lichens and
mosses similar to that which cover the tundras of the Arctic regions,
making a rich green mantle on which the showy flowering plants are
strikingly relieved, though these grow far more luxuriantly on the
banks of the streams where the drainage is less interrupted. Here also
the ferns, of which I saw three species, are taller a