vation of about four thousand feet above the level of the sea—an altitude corresponding to the midway terraces of the European Alps, and the average summit-regions of our Southern Alleghanies. The broad tablelands of the Cumberland Range are several hundred feet above the dust and mosquito level.
Between the thirty-fourth and thirty-sixth degrees of north latitude the elevated plateaux have the further advantage of a climate that equalizes the contrasts of the seasons: it mitigates the summer more than it aggravates the winter.
Southerly winds predominate, and melt the snow with the same breezes that cool the mid-summer weeks, for in the dog-days the Mexican tablelands are considerably cooler than our Northern prairie States.
Night frosts, it is true, occur a month earlier in the lowlands, but mark the beginning of the season when a sojourn in a mountain camp attains its maximum of sanitary benefit. How absurdly the risk of a bivouac in the snow has been overrated, may be inferred from the fact that the rumor of several miraculous cures a few years ago attracted hundreds of consumptives to winter-camps in the upper Adirondacks, in a climate quite
