THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC SOCIETY The main glacier was most beautiful, looking like a curious broad staircase of snowy whiteness, leading from where we stood heavenward. There were several fine waterfalls gushing out from holes in the cliffs high above us and disappearing before they reached the path, the rivulets of water oozing out again from the banks of the main stream, showing that the water had resumed a subterranean course. A curious feature about the falls was that as the power of the sun increased so did the waterfalls visibly increase in size. Our camp that night was a cheery one and we relieved the time by learning, to the great amusement of the bystanders, to play Bhutanese backgammon, our implements being two wooden dice, a collection of little wooden sticks of varying length, and a handful of beans. A short march brought us to the Phewla, or Ling-shi-La, over which pass we crossed into Tibet. By this time the different kinds of transport I had used during my tours had included, I should think, about every 455 known sort. I had made use of coolies, elephants, mules, ponies, donkeys, yaks, oxen, carts, pony-traps, rail, and steamer, and the only available animal I had not employed was the Tibetan pack-sheep. I hope I may have interested my readers by my account of this hitherto-unknown country, one so little known that as recently as 1890 a high Indian official wrote most undeservedly, as my explorations proved: "No one wishes to explore that tangle of jungle-clad and feverstricken hills, infested with leeches and the pipsa-fly, and offering no compensating advantages to the most enterprising pioneer. Adventure looks beyond Bhutan. Science passes it by as a region not sufficiently characteristic to merit special exploration." And with this quotation I must close for the present, though later I hope to give the readers of the NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE some of my impressions of Tibet itself, in which country I have also done a certain amount of traveling. THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC SOCIETY AND B ITS NEW BUILDING UILT with the solidity of a government building, planned as a model of what a building may be as the home of a great society and as the quarters of a large office force, the new building of the National Geographic Society combines every feature that modern architecture and sanitary engineering had to suggest toward making it the architectural representation of the ideals of the Society. Its splendid proportions are typical of the wonderful growth of a great movement for the increase and diffusion of geographic knowledge. That movement. began with the founding of the National Geographic Society, "for the increase and diffusion of geographic knowledge,' January 27, 1888, by a small band of explorers and scientists. For some ten years the Society followed the usual course of scientific so cieties, being a small institution with many ambitions, which the limitations of its funds prevented being fulfilled except in an imperfect way. Then, in 1899, came a new idea. Why not popularize the science of geography and take it into the homes of the people? Why not transform the Society's Magazine from one of cold geographic fact, expressed in hieroglyphic terms which the layman could not understand, into a vehicle for carrying the living, breathing, human-interest facts about this great world of ours to the people? Would not that be the greatest agency of all for the diffusion of geographic knowledge? A GEOGRAPHIC AWAKENING With an affirmative answer, a new era in geographic education dawned. The National Geographic Society found the whole world ready to enrich the pages of |