FEBRUARY. 79 



button hole ; the Andromeda tetragona, like a green marabon 

 feather. 



" Strongest among these transformations came the willows. 

 One, the SjHj; herbdcea, hardly larger than a trefoil clover ; 

 another, the S lix glauca, like a young althea just bursting 

 from its seed ; a third, the aS lix laiiata, a triton among 

 these boreal minnows, looked like an unfortunate garter-snake, 

 bound here and there by clawlike radicles, which, unable to 

 penetrate the inhospitable soil, had spread themselves out upon 

 the surface — traps for the broken lichens and fostering mosses 

 which formed its scanty soil." " While at this cove — in lat- 

 itude 76° 25' north — I saw and collected in the protected 

 nooks, among the grasses and saxifrages, a large number of 

 the Cochlearia (C danica) and ranunculus." 



The mysterious agency of spring, which while it vitalizes and 

 quickens the vegetable fluids enervates and wearies the physical 

 frame, likewise impressed our friend, from whose charming 

 volume we have, as our readers perceive, drawn largely in 

 these extracts, which strangely tell of flowers and fruit 

 amidst polar ices and winter's most impressive and magnifi- 

 cent realities. We feel this sensation creeping over us as the 

 song of the vernal sparrow and the flight of the blue bird 

 remind us that winter is over and gone ; and we are half 

 weary with the very change, which is to bring us so many 

 and so attractive delights. The same feeling comes over the 

 Arctic traveller as the spring approaches: and when our 

 thermometers indicate the mercury at 60^ and the tempera- 

 ture melts us down into drowsy laziness, so there the human 

 frame sinks under the singular influence of the season, when 

 the air is at the zero point about the beginning of the month 

 of April. 



The most northern Danish settlements boast not only of a 

 native flora, exuberant with miniature gems of flowery bells, 

 corols &nd spikelets of odor-breathing petals, but horticulture 

 is not neglected. Thus, this improvement on the first step 

 from nomadic life — the first initiatory process from the savao-e 

 and barbarous into the tilling of the soil — thus Horticulture 

 accompanies man in the refinements of his social position : 



