or
two, and a scarlet flowered dwarf Heliconia, kept up the tropic type,
as does a stiff brittle fern about two feet high. We picked the weeds,
which looked like English mint or basil, and found that most of them
had three longitudinal nerves in each leaf, and were really
Melastomas, though dwarfed into a far meaner habit than that of the
noble forms we saw at Chaguanas, and again on the other side of the
lake. On the right, too, in a hollow, was a whole wood of Groogroo
palms, gray stemmed, gray leaved, and here and there a patch of white
or black Roseau rose gracefully eight or ten feet high among the
reeds.

The plateau of pitch now widened out, and the whole ground looked like
an asphalt pavement, half overgrown with marsh-loving weeds, whose
roots feed in the sloppy water which overlies the pitch. But, as yet,
there was no sign of the lake. The incline, though gentle, shuts off
the view of what is beyond. This last lip of the lake has surely
overflowed, and is overflowing still, though very slowly. Its furrows
all curve downward; and it is, in fact, as one of our party said, "a
black glacier." The pitch, expanding under the burning sun of day,
must needs expand most toward the line of least resistance--that is,
downhill; and when it contracts again under the coolness of night, it
contracts, surely, from the same cause, more downhill than uphill; and
so each particle never returns to the spot whence it started, but
rather drags the particles above it downward toward itself. At least,
so it seemed to us. Thus may be explained the common mistake which is
noticed by Messrs. Wall and Sawkins in their admirable description of
the lake.

"All previous descriptions refer the bituminous matter scattered over
the La Brea district, and especially that between the village and the
lake, to streams which have issued at some former epoch from the lake,
and extended into the sea. This supposition is totally incorrect, as
solidification would probably have ensued before it had proceeded
one-tenth of the distance; and such of the asphalt as has undoubtedly
escaped from the lake has not advanced more than a few yards, and
always presents the curved surfaces already described, and never
appears as an extended sheet."

Agreeing with this statement as a whole, I nevertheless cannot but
think it probable that a great deal of the asphalt, whether it be in
large masses or in scattered veins, may be moving very slowly down
hill, from