to thirty dollars an acre, without the mineral rights which in some places are valuable.
When I got up the mountain on to a beautiful open top with groves of spruce, azaleas, and other trees and shrubs, I saw a great barn-like wooden hotel, but found it was still closed, the season not beginning till the middle of June. I had lunch with the caretaker, and, finding that it was too early for butterflies as well as for flowers at this elevation (about 5,000 feet), I returned. I had hoped to find the little Lilium Grayi, a species peculiar to the Southern Alleghanies, which was undiscovered when my book was published.1 The hotel is reached by a driving road from a distant station. If ever I visit this country again, I would travel with a waggon and tents, as the country is too thinly settled and too little developed to be properly explored when you are dependent on the hospitality of the farmers for a lodging. I cannot imagine a more charm¬ ing or productive trip than this for a naturalist, and with a good driver and a team of mules you might get about almost anywhere; the mountains are usually not very steep, and the forests not too thick or encumbered with fallen timber. I do not think much game would be found, as though black bears, deer and wild turkeys exist in remote places, I never saw any sign of these during my short stay in the country.
On my drive back to Marion I caught a few more butterflies, including a beautiful Argynnis and a rather rare species of Thecla confined to the Southern States. From Marion I went on by rail to Washington, where I was lucky enough to meet that very distinguished Tibetan traveller Mr. Rockhill, who is now appointed United States Minister at Pekin, and whose intimate knowledge of the language and people of China and energetic and determined character ought to make him a most admirable man for the post. I visited for the first time the Smithsonian Institution, which seems to be a most admirably arranged and conducted museum. Though it is especially rich in birds and mammals, and has perhaps the best collection of economic entomology in the world, the collection of American lepidoptera is very incomplete at present; and there are so many public museums springing up in the principal towns of the United States that there must be a good deal of competition among them to secure specimens, which would be far more useful to naturalists, at least to foreigners, if they could be brought together for study. I do not think there is at present any single collection of lepidoptera in the United States which contains anything like sufficient material to enable a catalogue of the lepidoptera of North America, or even of the United States, to be made. I have now seen all the principal collections, including those of Dr. Holland at Pittsburgh, which contains the greater part of the material used by Mr. W.H. Edwards in preparing his beautiful but incomplete work on the butterflies of North America; those of the late H. Edwards and Neumogen at New York; that of Dr. Skinner at Philadelphia, which contains perhaps the best set of American Hesperidæ in the United States; and that of Mr. Herman Strecker at Reading. All these collections united would perhaps, if well arranged, be sufficient for the purpose; and if the work was in the hands of a broad-minded specialist who had a sufficient
1 “Monograph of the Genus Lilium,” 1880.
