and ice-well. Camped around the fort were quite five hundred Indians, who had come there to trade. Some wore their native costumes of skins; others were tricked out in coats and shirts of civilized peoples. One old chief, known as "Red - Leggings," was gorgeous in a scarlet coat, with brass buttons and epaulets. The Indians were of many tribes. There were, for example, "Foolish Folks," "Wood Folks," "Birch - bark Folks," "Rat Folks," and "Hill Folks."

The fur-room of the fort was a rare sight. From the beams hung marten skins by the thousand, while the cheaper kinds of furs were lying upon the floor in huge heaps. There was a fair supply of the skins of the silver-gray and black fox. The latter is by far the most valuable. There is a story that one unlucky employé of the Company bought a skin of a white fox, which had been cunningly dyed black, paying for it more pounds than he should have paid shillings: the overplus was deducted from his salary. "Skins" are the currency of Fort Yukon. The unit is a beaver-skin, estimated at about half a dollar. Two martens count as one beaver, and so on.

On the 8th of July the party, who had in the mean time been rejoined by their two comrades who had months before gone on their up-river excursion, bade adieu to their hospitable entertainers, and, under a parting salute, canoed

down the river. They voyaged day and night, only stopping two or three times a day to boil their tea and fry their fish. It was a holiday excursion, the current sweeping them down at the rate of a hundred miles in the twenty-four hours. Nulato was reached on the 13th. Thence, two days later, they proceeded down the river, once making forty-five miles in seven hours.

Below Nulato the region is comparatively poor. It lies out of the way of traders, and as fish are plenty they are rather a drug in the market. Five needles was thought a fair price for a salmon of thirty pounds; and, says Mr. Whymper, "tobacco went further than we had ever known it to do before." On the 25th of July the party reached St. Michael's. whole voyage down the river, 1300 miles, had occupied just fifteen and a half days. There they got orders to get ready for immediate departure, for the telegraph enterprise had been definitely abandoned.

The

So ended an expedition which really gives us something new about Alaska-or rather a portion of it, for nine-tenths of the region which we have acquired is as yet wholly unknown ground, and most likely contains nothing worth knowing. The one thing which strikes the reader at once, and which confirms what is told by Richardson, Kane, Hall, and all other Arctic explorers, is the superabundance of animal

life existing in these northern regions. Strange as it may seem, tropical and semi-tropical regions are almost bare of living creatures. Strain and his party wandered for weeks through the thick forests of Central America, never seeing an animal or rarely even a bird; and, as far as one can judge, the rivers seemed almost destitute of fish. But life abounds in the Arctic regions. The rivers swarm with fish almost begging to be caught. The Kamchatdales have reindeer by the thousand. Whymper and his friends during their brief stay at Nulato bought the skins of 800 white hares, which were used to cover their blankets. The In

dians had caught them and appropriated the meat to their own use. Moose meat, varied by beaver, is the standing food of those who have got tired of salmon and such like fish. The delicacies are a moose's nose and a beaver's tail.

So abundant are the moose on the Yukon River that the natives hardly think it worth while to waste powder and shot in killing them. When an Indian, in his canoe, comes upon a moose swimming in the water, he chases it up until the creature is fatigued, then stabs it to the heart with his knife. They have also an ingenious way of corraling deer. They build

The question comes back to us-"Was the purchase of Alaska a wise one?" Viewed from a purely commercial stand-point, the answer must be "No." That the fish and furs there existing are worth more than seven and a quarter millions of dollars is beyond question. But the Government of the United States can not go into the business of catching salmon or beaver; nor can it undertake to farm out this right to individuals or companies. The sum paid for the purchase will never be returned directly to the Treasury.

But beyond the commercial view of the matter there is a political one. The acquisition of Alaska in effect places in our hands the whole Pacific coast of America. From the Arctic circle downward to the old debated line of 54° 40′ all is ours. Southward from this our present possessions, commencing at 49°, stretch downward to about 32°. It can hardly be doubted that before long Lower California will come into our hands, bringing our line down to the Tropic of Cancer. Then the only break in our Pacific line from the tropic to the Arctic circle will be the little strip now known as British Columbia, with a frontage upon the Pacific of barely three hundred miles. This, for a thousand reasons, the British Government will be glad to abandon upon any pretext; and so we, if we are wise, shall be able to say of the broad Pacific what the Romans were wont to say of the narrow Mediterranean, that it is "our sea."

Whether in the purchase of Alaska our Government took this broad view we can not say. If it did not, it built wiser than it knew.

To the foregoing paper we add a few notes drawn mainly from Mr. Whymper's book, for which no proper place was found in the body of the article.

rooms. But men who came to buy furs for nothing found that the price at Sitka was-freight deducted—just the same as at San Francisco; as indeed why should it not be? The Russian Fur Company could send its "skins" to San Francisco, and thence to Canton, or London, or elsewhere, quite as cheaply as Meyer Joseph could; and so the return boats from Sitka to San Francisco were crowded with most dissatisfied personages, who went there to shear and found themselves shorn. At the latest dates every body who could get away from Sitka had gone. Russians any way went pell-mell. whole city could in January have been bought for a song.

The

The British Government seems once to have had a serious idea of constructing a great railway and steamboat route from Montreal to the Pacific. Several noted engineers reported about plans and surveys. One Waddington read his paper thereupon before the Royal Geographical Society. All that was wanted was to track the Great Canadian Lakes and the Saskatchewan River for 1249 miles, and then catch Fraser River, in British Columbia, and follow it for 260 or 280 miles more, down to Bute Inlet, in British Columbia. By this route, out of the 3940 miles between Montreal and the Pacific, there would be 2400 miles by water. And, moreover, "the fertile settlement of the Red River, now detached and isolated, would be connected with civilization and the outer world." We imagine that no one who has read the various papers on this vast region which have from time to time appeared in this Magazine will be inclined to invest much solid cash in any enterprise like those suggested by British schemers. Nobody within the lives of living men will go overland from the Atlantic to the Pacific except through American territory.

The scheme to connect London and New York by way of Kamchatka was certainly absurd enough in itself. But the objections to the scheme were still more absurd. For instance, it was affirmed that a cable could not be safely laid across the narrowest part of Bering's Straits, because the icebergs sweeping down would infallibly cut it. To this there was given a quite satisfactory reply: There are no icebergs in Bering's Sea or Strait. The currents set into, not out of, the Arctic Ocean; and so quite likely the man is now living who will reach the North Pole by way, not of Green

"Dies iræ, dies illa,

Solvet sæclum in favilla "

HE twelve months embraced between the

7,

ber, 1868, were distinguished by a series of physical phenomena more remarkable than is known to have occurred during any equal period of time in history. The series was grandly initiated and typified by the startling atmospheric and terrestrial convulsions that afflicted the Windward Islands in the autumn of the first-named

year, and which were fast followed by fearful hurricanes, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions in almost every quarter and country of the globe,

earthquakes of the 13th and 16th of August, 1868. These earthquakes, for their extent, violence, and wide-spread devastation, will probably be regarded as the most terrible on record. They were felt, more or less severely, over an extent, from north to south, of more than sixty degrees of latitude, all the way from the Isth