central point, and not toward the mouth of the river. Each basin is filled with water to the lowest point of its rim, and each of the lakes thus formed is a storage reservoir receiving a group of streams from the surrounding country, and pouring an even discharge over its rim to one of its neighbors." The Niagara River is thus, from one point of view, a strait connecting the two inland seas of Erie and Ontario occupying two of these basins; from another point of view it is a part of the St. Lawrence River—the part connecting the two expansions. "Viewed either way, it departs so widely from the ordinary or normal river that its name is almost misleading." Further, "a normal river receives most of its water directly from rain or melting snow and varies with the season, swelling to a flood in time of storm or at the spring snow melting, and dwindling to relative insignificance in time of drought. The water of Niagara comes only remotely from storm and thaw. The floods of the tributaries are stored by the lakes, to whose broad surface they add but a thin layer. The volume of Niagara depends only on the height of Lake Erie at Buffalo, and from season to season this height varies but little. On rare occasions a westerly gale will crowd the lake water toward its eastern end, and the river will grow large. On still rarer occasions a winter storm will so pile up or jam the lake ice at the entrance to the river as to make a dam, and for a day or two the river will lose most of its water." The wastings of soil and gravel that are usually carried along by the streams in their course are carried by the tributaries of the St. Lawrence system only to the lakes, where they settle to the bottom. Hence, "Niagara is ever clear. Sometimes, when a storm lashes the shores of Erie, a little sand is washed to the head of the river and carried down stream; sometimes a little mud is washed into the river by the small creeks that reach its banks. Thus Niagara is not absolutely devoid of load, but its burden is so minute that it is hard to detect."
Himalayan Tea Porters.—Darjeeling tea, said Mr. George W. Christison, in a lecture before the British Society of Arts, is all carried by the hardy hill-men up the steep mountain roads to the nearest railway station on the way to market. It is no unusual day's work for a coolie to carry a tea chest, weigHing from one hundred and ten to one hundred and thirty pounds, a distance of five or six miles, making at the same time an ascent of from twenty-five hundred to thirty-five hundred feet in sheer vertical elevation. There can be no deception about a task like that, and we can not but have an admiration for the powers of endurance of those who perform such a feat. Of course, these people are trained to load-carrying and mountain-climbing from their very infancy, and hence the peculiar set of muscular faculties required for them are fully developed, if not actually called into existence at the cost of others—so much so that walking on a level, after a few miles, becomes positively painful to them. In the prosecution of their own trade, or in domestic affairs, they frequently undertake long, arduous journeys over ridges and along and across hot valleys, varying many thousands of feet in elevation, occupying many days, carrying heavy loads of from one hundred and fifty to two hundred pounds, and over and in addition to their food and bedding most cheerfully lighting a fire, cooking and eating their scanty meal, and going to sleep by the wayside. There is a story still current of a Bhootean in old times having carried a grand piano up the hill to Darjeeling, a distance of fifty miles forward, and involving a rise of more than five thousand feet in elevation by the old road. These hill tribes are a hardy people, capable of performing marvelous journeys without partaking of food, or on the most meager fare.
Progress in Botanical Study.—In connection with the history of the Botanical Gazette, Prof. C. E. Bessy has given in a paper on the Evolution of a Botanical Journal, read at the University of Nebraska and published in the American Naturalist, a view of the growth of interest in botany in the United States. The Gazette was started in November, 1875, by Prof. John M. Coulter, of Hanover College, Indiana, as the Botanical Bulletin, a monthly publication of four pages. Its name was changed in the second year to the Botanical Gazette. Its editorial force was increased from time to time, it went through several enlargements, and improvements were made in it; in ten years it
