Another twenty-four hours, through grand scenery, brought us, after three nights in our car berths, to Ogden, on Salt Lake, where we took a branch road and, skirting the lake along the whole eastern shore, reached Salt Lake City, the Mormon town, before sunset. Here we passed two nights and a day, and enjoyed scenery worth crossing the ocean for, and saw something of the strange life of the district.
Back to Ogden; two more nights and days, one long day crossing the Humboldt desert, rendered passable only by the Humboldt River, which, though the ragged mountains all run north and south, yet runs from east to west and marks its course by a narrow line of greenness, and at dusk we saw its end in the Humboldt sink, a lagoon without outlet on the western verge of the basin, against the Sierra, the arid side of which we were ascending all night, to awake among pine forests at sunrise; to breakfast upon the very summit soon after; to descend through most striking scenery into the great valley of California, and, traversing that and the Contra Costa range, to see the head of the Bay of San Francisco at dusk; to cross the bay in a steam-ferry, and reach our hotel in San Francisco at ten P.M.,—a journey full of interest, not a bit monotonous or dull, from first to last. There were fatigues and small discomforts, of course, but these are all forgotten long ago, and the whole transit dwells in memory as one continual and delightful piece of pleasant, novel, ever-varied, and instructive sight-seeing. Of course the identifying at sight, as we flew by, of flowers new to me in the living state, and the snatching at halts, and the physical features of districts which I had always been interested in, and knew much about but had never seen, all gave me occupation and continual pleasure. But it was much the same with all the party. Even the return journey was hardly less interesting....
From Dubuque we took steamer up the Mississippi River, through its finest scenery up to St. Paul, Minnesota; saw the falls of St. Anthony and Minnehaha; thence, while the rest of our party essayed Lake Superior, Mrs. Gray and I returned home by rapid stages.
I have only to-day finished the study and laying into the herbarium of specimens I gathered and dried, regretting the while that I did not collect more specimens and many other species, as I might have done.
Tyndall is in Boston, and I trust will be with us next week. I have not yet seen him, nor Froude, nor even MacDonald, the third lecturing notability in Boston.
TO CHARLES DARWIN.
Cambridge, October 6, 1872.
You delight me by your promise to take up Dionæa and Drosera now, and I imagine you as now about it. Good! And I am so glad you will take that opportunity to collect your botanical and quasi-botanical papers. These, with the Dionæa, etc., will make a nice and most welcome volume.
In answer to your query, I think I can “support the idea,” or the probability of it, “that tendrils become spiral after clasping an object from the stimulus from contact running down them.” For though some “tendrils do become spiral when they have clasped nothing,” others do not. The adjustment of the unstable equilibrium is more delicate in the former, so that it starts under some inappreciable cause or stimulus. That the stimulus may be so propagated downward is clear in the sensitive plant, where the closing of the leaflets in succession will follow the closing of the ultimate pair under slight and local irritation. And in the tendril the coiling below is just a continuation of the same movement or same change as that which incurved the tip in clasping, that is, a relative shortening of concave or lengthening of the convex side of the tendril. Would you not infer that the action was propagated downward?
So you were astonished at Mrs. Gray’s audacity. Well, “toujours l’audace;” she is all the better for it. Some horseback work in getting to and into the Yosemite Valley was severe, but she bore it so well that I ventured, when we made our detour into the Colorado Rocky Mountains, to take her up to the summit of Gray’s Peak, 14,300 feet, or thereabouts, where she acquitted herself nobly. The day was perfect, the success complete, and the memory of it one of the most delightful of the many pleasant memories of the whole journey. Our great trip was the round from San Francisco to Mariposa Grove, Yosemite Valley, entering over Glacier Point, from which (tell your sons) is a new trail down the 4,000 feet into the valley; made excursions from the valley during several days, and returned by a long sweep through the little Tuolumne grove, round foothills to Murphy’s and the Calaveras Grove, and so back to San Francisco. Afterwards Mrs. Gray and I went to Santa Cruz and up the San Lorenzo Valley among noble redwoods, rivaling the Sequoia gigantea. On return we made one stretch to the east base of the Rocky Mountains, then down to Denver, and up into the mountains, to 8,400 feet, where we had a pleasant week or more (just the climate to give strength to an invalid), whence I climbed a high mountain or two, among them Gray’s Peak, the highest, as already mentioned. Thence we came down to Dubuque and hot weather, on the Mississippi to St. Paul and St. Anthony, etc., and then home by rail, having been twelve busy weeks away.