64 FORESTRY OF NORWAY. 



from his volume entitled The Plant: a. Biography, supplies 

 interesting illustrations of what has thus been advanced : 

 ' If from the snow-covered ice plains of the extreme 

 north, where the red snow algae alone reminds us of the 

 existence of vegetable organisation, we turn towards the 

 south, a girdle first expands before us, in which mosses 

 and lichens clothe the soil, and a peculiar vegetation of 

 low plants, with subterranean perennial stems, and 

 generally large handsome flowers, the so-called Alpine 

 plants, gives a special character to nature. Almost all 

 the plants form little flattened separate tufts ; Pyrola, 

 Andromeda, Pedicularis, Cochlearia, poppies, crowfoots, and 

 others, are the characteristic genera of this flora, in which 

 no tree, no shrub, is found. Leaving this region, which 

 botanists call the region of mosses and saxifrages, we go 

 southward, and at first we see little low bushes of birches, 

 then more compact woods, into which the pines and 

 other coniferous trees assemble, and we at last find our- 

 selves in a second great zone of vegetation, which is 

 characterised by the woods consisting almost exclusively 

 of conifers, which thus impress a peculiar character upon 

 the flora ; firs and pines, Siberian stone pines and larches, 

 form great widely extended masses of forest ; by brooks 

 and on damp soil occur the willow and the alder. On 

 hills grow the reindeer lichen and the Iceland moss. In 

 the cranberry, cloudberry (Rubus Chamaemorus), and the 

 currant, nature gives spontaneously, though sparingly, food ; 

 and a rich flora of variegated flowers serves for the decora- 

 tion of the zone, which stretches in Scandinavia to the 

 northern limit of the cultivation of wheat, but in Russia 

 and Asia almost to Kazan and Yakutsk ; this we may 

 call the zone of the conifers. To the south of this zone 

 in Norway, so far north even as in the neighbourhood of 

 Dronthiem, lat. 64 15', the culture of fruit begins, 

 though sparingly ; soon appear the sturdy oak and woods 

 of beech. In about the latitude of Frankfort-on-the-Maine, 

 50 9', another tree joins company, which, in its bold 

 picturesque mode of branching, takes its stand beside the 



