Abstract
FEW regions offer more remarkable subjects for the student of nature than the State of California. There are the two great mountain ranges—the Coast Range on the west, and the Sierra Nevada on the east. Great cañons furrow the latter to depths of from two thousand to five thousand feet, and in the middle of the deepest of them flourish the Sequoia, the noble sugar and yellow pines, Douglas spruce, Libocedrus, and the silver firs, each a giant of its kind. Floods of lava cover the north half of the High Sierra, and volcanic craters, recent and in all stages of decay, are dotted over it. Mount Shasta is one of these volcanic cones, rising to a height of more than fourteen thousand feet above sea-level. Deep grooves flute the sides of the mountains, and testify to glacial erosion. It appears that so far south as latitude thirty-six degrees, traces of glacial action abound. Mr. Muir has found sixty-five residual glaciers in the portion of the Sierra lying between latitudes thirty-six and thirty-nine degrees. The first one of these was discovered by him in 1871 between two of the peaks of the Merced group. He also determined the rate of motion of the middle of the Maclure glacier, near Mount Lyell, to be but little more than an inch a day. Mount Shasta has three glaciers; while Mount Whitney, though the highest mountain in the range, has none.
The Mountains of California.
By John Muir. Pp. 381. (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1894.)
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The Mountains of California. Nature 51, 125 (1894). https://doi.org/10.1038/051125b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/051125b0