THE ARCTIC ZONE. 19 



of those who have endeavoured to throw any kind of light 

 upon these remote and unattractive regions. Sir William 

 Hooker has acquainted botanists with the character of ve- 

 getation in the American portion of the Arctic Zone ; but 

 the ' Flora of Lapland/ by Wahlenberg, was the first work 

 "in which the botanical geography of a particular country 

 has been worked out with extraordinary success." Much 

 attention seems to have been given to the flora of Lapland 

 by northern botanists. We read of a tour being made for 

 the express purpose of examining it as long ago as 1695, by 

 a botanist named Rudbeck, at the command of Charles XI. ; 

 unhappily all the copies of the first volume of his ' Campi 

 Elysii/ except two, were destroyed in the terrible fire at 

 Upsal in 1702. One of these has been lost; the other, the 

 sole remaining copy, is in the Sherardian Library at the 

 Botanic Gardens, Oxford. In 1732, Linnseus, then a young 

 man of about five-and-twenty, was appointed by the Royal 

 Academy of Sciences at Upsal to make the tour of Lapland ; 

 and it is remarkable that he also lost many of the natural 

 productions he had collected, by the upsetting of a boat. 



" The most eastern countries of the old continent which 

 project into the Arctic Zone are unfortunately quite un- 

 known;" and it is expected that the character of their ve- 



