A DREARY WILDERNESS. 545 



which we may consider as belonging to the elevation of the Altai, 

 prolong even to the Arctic shores their cantled and snow-shrouded 

 peaks. Everywhere, also, immense steppes, intersected by swamps 

 and relieved with woods of fir and birch, spread for leagues upon 

 leagues in the dull light of a wintry sky, until they merge into those 

 rent and rocky plains, bare of all vegetation except a few lichens and 

 mosses, which are almost always encrusted in glittering snow and ice, 

 and mingle in the distance with the frost-bound waters of the Arctic 

 Sea. 



It is in America that these icy deserts are most extensive ; not 

 only because that continent stretches much nearer the Pole than does 

 the Old World, but because, owing to its geographical disposition and 

 geological structure, it is much more exposed, even towards the south, 

 to that combined action of the atmosphere, land, and water, whose 

 effects constitute the Arctic climate.* 



This climate, then, prevails over nearly the whole of Danish 

 America, the recently-acquired possessions of the United States, the 

 Hudson's Bay Territory, and Labrador, down to that inconsiderable 

 watershed which separates from the tributaries of Hudson's Bay, the 

 three basins of the St. Lawrence, the five great lakes, and the 

 Mississippi. This line of watershed undulates between the 52nd 

 and 49th parallel of latitude, from Belle-Isle Strait to the sources 

 of the Saskatchewan, in the Rocky Mountains, where it inflects 

 towards the Pacific Ocean, skirting on the north the basin of the 

 Columbia. 



"Thus circumscribed on the side of the south," say Messieurs 

 Herve 7 and F. de Lanoye,-f- "the Arctic lands of America, including the 

 archipelagoes of the north and north-east, cannot measure less than 

 560,000 square leagues. They therefore greatly exceed in super- 

 ficies the mass of the European lands, estimated at about 490,000 

 square leagues." 



* The isothermal line of 0, which in Europe scarcely touches the North Cape of Lapland 

 (about 72), descends in America fully 20 degrees lower, even to the south of James Bay. 

 f Herve and Lanoyo, " Voyages dans les Glaces du Pole Arctique," chap. i. (Paris, 1854) . 



35 



