At present he is making a scientific excursion upon the upper Missouri, as he did last year to the sources of the Mississippi and its tributaries. He is accompanied by an American lieutenant [Fremont], a German botanist [Charles A. Geyer], very distinguished and tireless in his researches, and several guides. His works will be a treasure for the literary world. He is a very deeply learned man, and a solid Catholic at the same time, who examines his subject on the spot and spares neither time nor pains nor his purse to go to the bottom of the matters he writes upon. He made me a present of several instruments, thermometers, barometers, compass, etc., to take observations during the summer, to aid those he was making in the upper country.
The water of the river was very low and the snags and sand-bars very numerous everywhere, so our progress was slow and we had plenty of opportunities to make excursions in the woods and prairies and over the hills in search of minerals, petrifactions and rare and new plants, which abound in those regions. In a walk of this kind which I was taking with the botanist, he led me to the top of a hill 300 feet high. The path up which we went was quite practicable, but our descent in another place was different. I followed him, thinking that I could go where he had gone, but almost the first step I took, the slippery earth gave way under my feet, and I made a third of the descent at railroad speed. It seemed dangerous and impossible to return by the way I had come, and I found that the rest of the hillside was still steeper. Hung up there 200 feet above the river, I did not find myself very well fixed for meditation or reflection. But I took careful measures and partly by jumping from rock to rock and crawling from shrub to shrub, and partly on my hind-quarters without regard to my breeches, which felt this treatment deeply, I reached terra firma in safety. There the lover of Flora was already waiting for me, and being highly pleased with his discoveries he told me "that he did not think there was any pleasure on earth to be compared to an excursion of this kind." He