THE HEATH. 99 



favourite food, and not only derives sufficient 

 aliment from this sapless lichen, but even fattens 

 upon it. The herdsman, therefore, has no need 

 to build houses, in which his herds may be stalled 

 during winter, and in summer is equally exempt 

 from the necessity of cutting, saving, and hus- 

 banding his hay." 



In another place the same author says, " The 

 reindeer sometimes suffers great hardships in 

 autumn when the snow happens to have all melt- 

 ed away during summer, and a sudden frost 

 freezes the Mountain Lichen, which is his only 

 winter food. When this fails, the animal has 

 no other resource, for he never touches hay." 

 A calamity of this kind, however, occurs as rarely 

 as a famine in England; for the winter there is 

 almost always ushered in by falls of snow, which 

 being a bad conductor of heat, prevents the 

 warmth of the earth from being dissipated by 

 radiation. How admirably in this case has Pro- 

 vidence adapted the animal and its native country 

 to each other. A cold, bleak district, sheltered 

 but here and there by a few fir trees, and scantily 

 furnished even with grass, Lapland would seem to 

 be " a land to which inhabitants are denied ;" but 

 it is, nevertheless, plentifully stocked with animals 

 belonging to a tribe whose subsistence, in other 

 climates, consists chiefly of herbs that in Lapland 

 are no where to be found in sufficient abundance 

 to constitute an article of food. But, unproduc- 

 tive of grass though it be, it abounds in a vegetable 

 which in other regions is of little value, and rarely 

 attains any considerable size. In this cold climate, 

 however, it grows luxuriantly, and is spread in 

 such profusion over the plains, that it affords a 



