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course. It will lead him through scenery grand, magnificent, and 

 beautiful. 



My route leading me through Christiania, I entered Sweden by 

 Charlottenburg, which, like some of the other places at which I 

 rested, or through which I passed, I found to be pleasantly situated 

 and cheerful. The journey made continuously by rail occupies about 

 eighteen hours. On the way I saw nothing like the mountain 

 scenery of Norway, but several extensive lakes in a level country, 

 apparently only some three or four feet higher than their surface ; and 

 I saw nothing of the forests of Sweden, which are situated in part 

 somewhat to the south and in far greater part further to the north. 



The forests of Sweden are extensive, covering about two-sevenths 

 of its entire area. The varieties of timber, however, are few. In the 

 north the pine, birch, and fir are the principal trees ; in the central 

 parts the ash, alder, willow, and maple are also common ; and in the 

 south the oak, beech, elm, and lime are met with. In the plain of 

 Scania the mulberry, chestnut, pear, apple, and walnut trees flourish. 



In Sweden, says Marny, a French writer on the forests of Europe, 

 the woods are numerous, but little productive, and we only rarely 

 meet with vast forests. Dalecarlia, Wermeland, and the district of 

 Orvebro are the only central counties where arborescent vegetation 

 attains sufficient energy to cover with wood a large extent of country. 

 There the Conifer almost always constitute the basis of the forests. 

 Sometimes, however, the birch replaces them, notably in Oster-Goth- 

 land. Sweden, like America and Siberia, has her forest fires, which 

 deprive in a brief time a whole forest of its shade; and vegetable life 

 once destroyed revives only with difficulty on this frozen soil. 



In Norway the forests are more extensive ; they stretch along the 

 Scandinavian Alps, which separate this country from Sweden. The 

 birch there reaches an altitude of 1,200 feet above the sea. 



In the diocese of Bergen the fir has still the gigantic proportions 

 seen in the forests of Switzerland and Germany, but more to the north 

 its size is diminished to stunted proportions, and at the polar circle it 

 has totally disappeared ; whilst in Swedish Lapland it advances yet to 

 two degrees beyond it. 



In Norway it is the birch which really serves as a ladder to vegeta- 

 tion. It is the measure of its energy, and it marks by the different 

 states through which it passes, in proportion as it rises in altitude, the 

 degree of weakness of vegetable life. To the weeping birch succeeds the 

 Betula acer, which replaces the white birch; after which comes the birch 

 of the prairies, which passes in its turn through different gradations 

 of size, and which at the polar circle is nothing more than a stunted 

 shrub of pyramidal form, and covered with moss. 



In Sweden of late years strenuous and successful efforts have been 



