The country is disturbed, and one can only stir out in the valley itself
close to camp, which is the more tantalizing as the mountains are
accessible, and covered with forest. Our halt here should put us in
possession of much information respecting these forests. As it is, I
shall leave probably as wise as I came, except in having ascertained that
the change from the well-wooded Himalaya mountains to those of the Hindoo-
koosh, without even a shrub five feet high, takes place to the east of
this. My employment is surveying and collecting data for ascertaining
the heights of the hills around. But wherever I turn, the question
suggests itself, what business have I here collecting plants, with so
many in Calcutta demanding attention? How I am living! alone, without a
table, chair, wine, or spirits, with a miserable beard, and in native
clothes! but one thus saves much time; how unfortunate that mine now is
not worth saving!

"I have been reading Swainson's volumes in Lardner's Cyclopaedia, in
which there is a little to which severe critics may object, but a vast
deal more that is beautifully sound. I am quite certain I never
appreciated them before. How wonderful that no one before Macleay and
Swainson thought that living beings were created on one plan. I have
imbibed all the important parts with the hope of bringing them to bear on
Botany, which is in a shameful state. One talks of the typical nature of
polypetalous or monopetalous plants; another ridicules the idea, because
as he wisely says, some polypetalous plants are monopetalous, and vice
versa!! he objects, in fact to what constitutes the great value of a
character, _its mode of variation_. All Swainson's propositions
appear to me philosophical and highly probable, but none of the present
generation have eyes young enough to bear such a flood of light as he has
thrown upon them. There are faults I acknowledge, but a man who writes
for money does not always write for fame; rapid writing and much more
rapid publishing is a vast evil, but one which is too often unavoidable.
I have four or five drawings of fish, one of the spotted carnivorous
carp, the most carnivorous type of all except Opsarion, and perhaps a new
subgenus; {0b} one of the Sir-i-Chushme and Khyber _Oreinus_, and a
Perilamp with two long cirrhi on the upper lip. I intend in my travels
now I am alone, to stop at every fertile place. I am ascertaining the
limit of the inferior snow in these