air. The roof is very flat, composed of a layer of pine deals, and retained in its position by transverse rafters, upon which are piled fragments of rock to act as ballast when assailed by high winds. This precaution is universal in all places of similar elevation, where, unless so provided, the chalet, like a vessel breaking from her moorings, would literally drift before the wind. But the resistance which these seemingly frail habitations oppose to the "ouragans" of the Alps is almost incredible-and the more so to those who have had personal evidence of their violence.

Saussure, while prosecuting his researches in the Alps of Savoy, took shelter in one of the chalets on the Môle, just as one of these hurricanes began. Every instant, so long as it lasted, he expected the chalet would have been carried away; for, although quite low, squatted on the earth, and its roof covered with masses of stone so as to oppose the least possible resistance to the wind, it often happens that the weather side of the sloping roof is lifted up by the storm and thrown completely over upon the other, in the same manner as by a breath we turn over the leaf of a book.

When the storm had partially subsided, Saussure wishing to judge for himself of its diminished force, although cautioned by the inmates against the experiment, withdrew the bar which confined the door. In an instant it was blown open with such violence as to throw the philosopher completely off his balance, and pile up every article of furniture against the opposite wall. Had this experiment been tried but a short time previously, the chalet and its lodgers would have made a very precipitate retreat. When such gusts suddenly overtake the cattle on pastures bordered with precipices, they are borne down by them as easily as an October blast on the plain hurries the dry leaves before it. But if the storm comes on by degrees, and only reaches this pitch of violence after a certain space, the wary animals, fully sensible of their danger, turn their heads to leeward, and spreading out their fore legs with their hoofs edged firmly into the soil, ride out the storm like a ship at anchor. From the moment it is assumed, nothing will induce them to change their position. There they might be killed or maimed without the power of forcing them to take one step from the spot where nature has instructed them to make their stand. The chief thing to be attended to in these pastures is to prevent the cattle from being suddenly exposed to the storm; and with this view, when any symptom of an approaching tempest manifests itself, all the women and children run to drive the cattle from the precipices into the more retired pastures.

In prosecuting our route along the left bank of the Lütschinen, Nature displays evidence of her working in the most awful forms. Rocks, suspended