THE BARREN LAXDES. 649 



scourge, which the traveller can only escape by surrounding himself 

 with clouds of smoke. 



The commencement of the region of " Barren Landes " is marked 

 by a line drawn from the mouth of the Churchill in Hudson's Bay to 

 Mount St. Elias on the Pacific coast, and passing by the southern 

 shores of the Bear and the Slave Lakes. To the north of this region 

 it loses itself in the eternal ices, with the last shores of the Parry 

 Archipelago ; to the east and to the north-east, the conformity of the 

 soil and the identity of the climate include within it the greatest part 

 of Labrador and all Greenland, from which it is only separated acci- 

 dentally by the breaking up of the ices which constantly solidify 

 Baffin's Bay, and renders so difficult, in those districts, the distinction 

 between land and water. " In these vast countries," say the writers 

 already quoted, " the primitive crust of the globe preserves still the 

 chaotic character which it assumed at the moment that its fluid elements 

 congealed. Except at the bottom of the ravines and hollows, where 

 each winter's thaw has accumulated long tracts of moss and the 

 wrecks of dwarf willows the embryo vegetation of the Polar clime 

 the slow action of the ages has nowhere oxidized this rough rude 

 surface to the extent of clothing with a layer of mould its abrupt 

 nakedness. There no transitionary stratum extends between the 

 primeval granite and the erupted rocks. There, prolonged chains of 

 trachyte, and gigantic causeways of basalt, display again their strata 

 as regular, their ridges as keen, their rents as deep, as on the morrow 

 of that day when they emerged from the original chaos. At a great 

 number of points, as at the bottom of Repulse Bay and in the interior 

 of Melville Island, whole skeletons of whales elevated from the depths 

 of ocean, with the submarine layer wherein death had ensepulchred 

 them, have not received in all the ages that have passed by since 

 their exposure to the day any other shroud than the snows of 

 successive winters, which, melting before the suns of successive 

 summers, annually uncovers their whitened bones, irrefragable proofs 

 of a great geological law." 



In Asia, the isothermal line of descends even towards the 



