Cosmos Author:Alexander von Humboldt Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: of the Himalaya. But although the mountains of India greatly surpass the Cordilleras of South America, by their astonishing elevation, (which after being long co... more »ntested has at last been eonfirmed by accurate measurements,) they cannot, from their geographical position, present the same inexhaustible variety of phenomena by which the latter are characterised. The impression produced by the grander aspects of nature does not depend exclusively on height. The chain of the Himalaya is placed far beyond the limits of the torrid zone, and scarcely is a solitary palm-tree to be found in the beautiful valleys of Kumaoun and Garhwal. On the southern slope of the ancient Paropamisus, in the latitudes of 28 and 34, nature no longer displays the same abundance of tree-ferns, and arborescent grasses, heliconias and orchideous plants, which in tropical regions are to be found even on the highest plateaux of the mountains. On the slope of the Himalaya, under the shade of the Deodora and the broad-leaved oak, peculiar to these Indian Alps, the rocks of granite and of mica schist are covered with vegetable forms, almost similar to those which characterise Europe and Northern Asia. The species are not identical, but closely analogous in aspect and physiognomy, as for instance, the juniper, the alpine birch, the gentian, the marsh parnassia, and the prickly species of Ribes.f The The absence of palms and tree-ferns on the temperate slopes of the Himalaya is shown in Don's Flora Nepalensis, 1825, and in the remarkable series of lithographs of Wallich's Flora Indica, whose catalogue contains the enormous number of 7,683 Himalaya species, almost all phanerogamic plants, which have as yet been but imperfectly classified. In Nepaul (lat. 26J to 27J) there has hitherto been observed only one species o...« less