“It has been called a terra incognita and a place where no human being could live.  Well, it is bad enough, but perhaps not quite so bad as that.  The great trouble is the scarcity of water and the intense heat.  But many prospecting parties go there looking for veins of ore and to take out borax.  The richest borax mines in the world are found there.  The valley is about 75 miles long by 10 miles wide.  The lowest point is near the center, where it is about 150 ft. below the level of the sea.  Just 15 miles west of this central point is Telescope peak, 11,000 ft. above the sea, and 15 miles east is Mt.  Le Count, in the Funeral mountains, 8,000 ft. high.  The valley runs almost due north and south, which is one reason for the extreme heat.  The only stream of water in or near the valley flows into its upper end and forms a marsh in the bed of the valley.  This marsh gives out a horrible odor of sulphureted hydrogen, the gas which makes a rotten egg so offensive.  Where the water of this stream comes from is not very definitely known, but in my opinion it comes from Owen’s lake, beyond the Telescope mountains to the west, flowing down into the valley by some subterranean passage.  The same impurities found in the stream are also found in the lake, where the water is so saturated with salt, boracic acid, etc., that one can no more sink in it than in the water of the Great Salt lake; and I found it so saturated that after swimming in it a little while the skin all over my body was gnawed and made very sore by the acids.  Another reason why I think the water of the stream enters the valley by some fixed subterranean source is the fact that, no matter what the season, the flow from the springs that feed the marsh is always exactly the same.

“The heat there is intense.  A man cannot go an hour without water without becoming insane.  While we were surveying there, we had the same wooden cased thermometer that is used by the signal service.  It was hung in the shade on the side of our shed, with the only stream in the country flowing directly under it, and it repeatedly registered 130 deg.; and for 48 hours in 1883, when I was surveying there, the thermometer never once went below 104 deg..”—­Boston Herald.

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HEMLOCK AND PARSLEY.

By W.W.  BAILEY.

The study of the order Umbelliferae presents peculiar difficulties to the beginner, for the flowers are uniformly small and strikingly similar throughout the large and very natural group.  The family distinctions or features are quite pronounced and unmistakable, and it is the determination of the genera which presents obstacles—­serious, indeed, but not insurmountable.  “By their fruits shall ye know them.”