John Muir, the geologist with the Corwin Arctic Expedition, describes, as follows, the characteristics of Herald Island, hitherto known only as an inaccessible rock seen by a few venturesome whalers and explorers:

After so many futile efforts had been made to reach this little ice bound island, everybody seemed wildly eager to run ashore and climb to the summit of its sheer granite cliffs. At first a party of eight jumped from the bowsprit chains and ran across the narrow belt of margin ice and madly began to climb up an excessively steep gully, which came to an end in an inaccessible slope a few hundred feet above the water. Those ahead loosened and sent down a train of granite bowlders, which shot over the heads of those below in a far more dangerous manner than any of the party seemed to appreciate. Fortunately nobody was hurt, and all made out to get down in safety. While this remarkable piece of mountaineering and Arctic exploration was in progress, a light skin-covered boat was dragged over the ice and launched on a strip of water that stretched in front of an accessible ravine, the bed of an ancient glacier, which I felt assured would conduce by an easy grade to the summit of the island. The slope of this ravine for the first hundred feet or so was very steep, but inasmuch as it was full of firm, icy snow, it was easily ascended by cutting steps in the face of it with an ax that I had brought from the ship for the purpose. Beyond this there was not the slightest difficulty in our way, the glacier having graded a fine, broad road.

ON THE SUMMIT.

Kellet, who discovered this island in 1849, and landed on it under unfavorable circumstances, describes it as an inaccessible rock. The sides are, indeed, in general, extremely sheer and precipitous all around, though skilled mountaineers would find many gullies and slopes by which they might reach the summit. I first pushed on to the head of the glacier valley, and thence along the back bone of the island to the highest point, which I found to be about twelve hundred feet above the level of the sea. This point is about a mile and a half from the northwest end, and four and a half from the northeast end, thus making the island about six miles in length. It has been cut nearly in two by the glacial action it has undergone, the width at this lowest portion being about half a mile, and the average width about two miles. The entire island is a mass of granite with the exception of a patch of metamorphic slate near the center, and no doubt owes its existence with so considerable a height to the superior resistance this granite offered to the degrading action of the northern ice sheet, traces of which are here plainly shown, as well as on the shores of Siberia and Alaska, and down through Behring Strait, southward, beyond Vancouver Island. Traces of the subsequent partial glaciation it has been subjected to are also manifested in glacial valleys of considerable depth as compared with the size of the island. I noticed four of these, besides many marginal glacial grooves around the sides. One small remnant with feeble action still exists near the middle of the island. I also noted several scored and polished patches on the hardest and most enduring of the outswelling rock bosses. This little island, standing as it does alone out in the Polar Sea, is a fine glacial monument.

A MIDNIGHT OBSERVATION.

The midnight hour I spent alone on the highest summit, one of the most impressive hours of my life. The deepest silence seemed to press down on all the vast, immeasurable, virgin landscape. The sun near the horizon reddened the edges of belted cloud bars near the base of the sky, and the jagged ice bowlders crowded together over the frozen ocean stretching indefinitely northward, while more than a hundred miles of that mysterious Wrangell Land was seen blue in the northwest—a wavering line of hill and dale over the white and blue ice prairie and pale gray mountains beyond, well calculated to fix the eye of a mountaineer; but it was to the far north that I ever found myself turning, where the ice met the sky. I would fain have watched here all the strange night, but was compelled to remember the charge given me by the captain, to make haste and return to the ship as soon as I should find it possible, as there was ten miles of shifting, drifting ice between us and the open sea.

PLANT LIFE ON HERALD ISLAND.

I therefore began the return journey about one o'clock this morning, after taking the compass bearings of the principal points within sight on Wrangell Land, and making a hasty collection of the flowering plants on my way. I found one species of poppy, quite showy, and making considerable masses of color on the sloping uplands, three or four species of saxifrage, one silene, a draba, dwarf willow, stellaria, two golden compositÆ, two sedges, one grass, and a veronica, together with a considerable number of mosses and lichens, some of them quite showy and so abundant as to form the bulk of the color over the gray granite.

INHABITANTS OF THE CLIFFS.

Innumerable gulls and murres breed on the steep cliffs, the latter most abundant. They kept up a constant din of domestic notes. Some of them are sitting on their eggs, others have young, and it seems astonishing that either eggs or the young can find a resting place on cliffs so severely precipitous. The nurseries formed a lively picture—the parents coming and going with food or to seek it, thousands in rows standing on narrow ledges like bottles on a grocer's shelves, the feeding of the little ones, the multitude of wings, etc.

M. Bouchut's experiments with pepsine for destroying worms in the stomach and bowels have been continued with extremely promising results. Even the tapeworm succumbs to the digestive action of pepsine in large doses, while the more highly organized tissues of the stomach are unaffected.