24, 
interesting to us as Ethnologists. The specimens you see 
before you on the table were collected by me during the 
voyage to which I have alluded, and I intend, at present, 
merely io call your attention to the external differences you 
will perceive between them and their representatives which 
have been grown in a more southern latitude. I am not 
going deeply into this subject. I have often said that if each 
lecturer, or author of a paper, were content to impress one 
single point on the memory of his hearers, he would do more 
good than by entering into the more abstruse details, which 
are so hard to avoid. Now the point I want to impress on 
you to-night is the very marked difference in size which 
occurs in plants when they are grown in very high latitudes, or 
what is nearly the same thing, at great heights above the 
sea-level. As you all know, whether you recede farther and 
farther from the equator, or whether you ascend higher and 
higher above the sea level, either in a balloon or up the sides 
of a mountain, the result is the same, a steady decrease of 
temperature, and thus we have the Flora of high mountain 
ranges, closely coinciding with that of the extreme poles. 
As the cold increases vegetation becomes less and less luxu- 
riant; ferns diminish in size, and finally disappear; trees 
dwindle down till only the hardy white Birch and the Pine 
remain, which after pushihg out an advanced guard as far as 
70 degrees North latitude in Norway completely disappear 
and give place to grasses, and finally to cryptograms (mosses), 
lichens, and microscopic fungi. Many of the specimens 
before you are from Spitzbergen, the farthest north of any 
known land. A wild, vast, bleak island, perpetually hemmed 
in by ice, save where the genial influences of the Gulf Stream 
thaw it away—on tis western and southern coasts. A region 
almost entirely covered in perpetual ice and snow—where 
human life is impossible, and where the ground, in even the 
most favored localities, is never thawed deeper than two 
inches below its surface. Here then is the most advanced 
outpost of organic life, beyond stretches only a death-like 
expanse of dreary ice. (Spitzbergen is not, you must recol- 
lect, the tiny spot of earth one usually sees represented on the 
maps; it extends over 10 degrees of latitude, and is in con- 
sequence larger than Ireland or even England). When I 
remind you that there is total night in Spitzbergen for four 
