dark-coloured and lean, tender, sweet, and short-fibred. Birds were
scarce, with the exception of alpine pigeons (_Columba leuconota_),
red-legged crows (_Corvus graculus,_ L.), and the horned pheasant
(_Meleagris Satyra,_ L.). In this month insects are scarce, _Elater_
and a black earwig being the most frequent: two species of _Serica_
also flew into my tent, and at night moths, closely resembling
European ones, came from the fir-woods. The vegetation in the,
neighbourhood of Lamteng is European and North American; that is to
say, it unites the boreal and temperate floras of the east and west
hemispheres; presenting also a few features peculiar to Asia. This is
a subject of very great importance in physical geography; as a
country combining the botanical characters of several others, affords
materials for tracing the direction in which genera and species have
migrated, the causes that favour their migrations, and the laws that
determine the types or forms of one region, which represent those of
another. A glance at the map will show that Sikkim is,
geographically, peculiarly well situated for investigations of this
kind, being centrically placed, whether as regards south-eastern Asia
or the Himalayan chain. Again, the Lachen valley at this spot is
nearly equi-distant from the tropical forests of the Terai and the
sterile mountains of Tibet, for which reason representatives both of
the dry central Asiatic and Siberian, and of the humid Malayan floras
meet there.

The mean temperature of Lamteng (about 50 degrees) is that of the
isothermal which passes through Britain in lat. 52 degrees, and east
Europe in lat. 48 degrees, cutting the parallel of 45 degrees in
Siberia (due north of Lamteng itself), descending to lat. 42 degrees
on the east coast of Asia, ascending to lat. 48 degrees on the west
of America, and descending to that of New York in the United States.