THE GLACIERS OF NORWAY. 459 



ordinary track of pleasure-travel, is far less known or appreciated. 

 Norway may, in fact, be styled with good reason the country of the 

 glacier. True, the height of its mountains does not approximate to 

 that of the Alps. Only one or two summits exceed 8,000 feet in alti- 

 tude, and this elevation is not much more than half that of Mont 

 Blanc. But almost the entire country stands high above the level of 

 the ocean, while its situation so far toward the north enables the snow- 

 fields, which are the feeders of the glaciers, to retain their vast accu- 

 mulations with little loss thi'ough rain or thaw. 



If the reader will glance at a map of Norway, he will see that 

 tliere are two well-defined divisions : the southern, a region not desti- 

 tute of flourishing cities and towns ; and the northern, a narrow strip 

 consisting of little more than a succession of headlands and islands, 

 stretching far within the Arctic Circle. Both divisions have their 

 characteristic, that the mountain-ranges rise in the form of wide table- 

 lands, extending for long distances in so nearly a perfect level " that, 

 did roads exist, a coach-and-four might be driven along or across them 

 for many miles." The very valleys that break up their continuity are 

 unperceived by the eye, being overlooked on account of their narrow- 

 ness ; and the view is interrupted, only by slight undulations, or by 

 occasional mountains of no great size. Here it is that, summer and 

 winter, the moisture which elsewhere descends in the form of rain, 

 spreads the successive layers of the great Sneefon.. Prof. Forbes, in 

 the map accompanying his interesting work on " The Glaciers of Nor- 

 way," indicates not less than eighteen of these " chief permanent snow- 

 fields " to the south of Trondhjem, and nineteen in the narrow strip 

 north of that city. It must not, however, be concluded too hastily 

 that the climate of Norway is cold and inhospitable ; for no greater 

 contrast can be found between countries lying in the same latitude, 

 than between Norway and Greenland. The influence of the Gulf 

 Stream is nowhere more strikingly traced ; for, if the summers in 

 Christiania are comparatively cool, the winters are as warm as in 

 many places far to the south of it. Indeed, it is the remarkably 

 equable temperature of Norway which, while it prevents the harbors 

 from being closed by drifting ice, like those of the opposite shores of 

 Greenland, yet, allows the line of perpetual snow to come down as low 

 as 4,000 or 5,000 feet above the sea-level. For it has been conclusive- 

 ly proved that it is not so much the intensity of the winter's cold, as 

 the amount of the summer's heat, that fixes the point where frost reigns 

 supreme throughout the year. So it happens that, while the haven 

 of Bergen, in latitude 60, is frozen over only twice or three times in 

 a hundred years, or about as often as the same fate befalls the Seine 

 at Paris, the eternal snows cover the mountain-sides in the neighbor- 

 hood of Bergen at heights at which the peasant on the Jura or the 

 Alps pastures his flocks through the long summer months. 



Of late, the savants of Norway have been giving to the world the 



