[Footnote 2: NEW YORK SATE GAZETTEER.]

The above-named ranges are not always clearly defined, as cross spurs or
single mountains sometimes occupy the entire space between two ridges,
reducing the customary valley to a mere ravine. The usual uncertainty
and redundancy of nomenclature common to mountain regions, adds to the
difficulty of obtaining or conveying clear ideas of the local
distribution of elevation and depression. On the northern slope, the
three rivers, Boquet, Au Sable (with two branches, East and West), and
Saranac, furnish to the traveller excellent guides for the arrangement
of his conceptions, regarding the general face of the country. To the
south, the same office is performed by the various branching headwaters
of the Hudson.

These mountains are granitic, and the river bottoms have a light, sandy
soil. The Au Sable well deserves its name, not only from the bar at its
mouth, but also from the sand fields through which it chiefly flows.
Steep, bare peaks, wild ravines, and stupendous precipices characterize
the loftier ranges. The waterfalls are numerous and beautiful, and the
lakes lovely beyond description. More than one hundred in number, they
cluster round the higher groups of peaks, strings of glittering gems
about the stately forms of these proud, dark-browed, Indian
beauties--mirrors wherein they may gaze upon the softened outlines of
their haughty heads, their wind-tossed raiment of spruce fir, pines, and
birch.

In the lowest valleys the oak and chestnut are abundant, but as we leave
the shores of Lake Champlain and ascend toward the west, the beech and
basswood, butternut, elm, ash, and maple, hemlock and arbor vitae,
tamarack, white, black, and yellow pines, white and black birch,
gradually disappear, until finally the forest growth of the higher
portions of the loftier summits is composed almost exclusively of the
various species of spruce or fir. The tamarack sometimes covers vast
plains, and, with the long moss waving from its sombre branches, looks
melancholy enough to be fancied a mourner over the ring of the axe
felling noble pines, the crack of the rifle threatening extermination to
the deer once so numerous, or the cautious tread of the fisherman under
whose wasteful rapacity the trout are gradually disappearing. We have
reason to be thankful that all are not yet gone--that some splendid
specimens are left to tell the glorious tale of the primeval forest,
that on the more seclu