136 FORESTRY OF NORWAY. 



sive or continental climates the precipitations arecompara- 

 tively small. Thus, to take one illustration, in Iceland 

 snow lies all the year at a height of only 3,100 feet, whilst 

 in Norway, on the same parallel, the snow-line would 

 approach 4000 feet. 



' The same general principle holds good in the Southern 

 Hemisphere ; its temperature on the whole being greatly 

 inferior to that of the north (though the extremes are less). 

 It acts towards the rest of the globe in some measure as 

 the refrigeratory of a great distilling apparatus (as some 

 one has correctly observed), and its higher latitudes are 

 the seat of almost continual storms and fog, of which the 

 climate of Cape Horn is a familiar example. Summer can 

 there hardly be said to exist, and the snow-line is propor- 

 tionally low. According to Sir James Ross, the first 

 authority of his time on this subject, the snow-line does 

 reach the level of the sea in the Antartic regions at a 

 latitude between 67 and 71, under which forests still 

 grow in Norway, and even corn in some sheltered places.' 



Forbes proceeds to give numerous estimates of the alti- 

 tude of the snow-line in different parts of Norway, which 

 may be of great value in the study of meteorology, but 

 what we require is simply the substance of the whole ; 

 and a generalisation of the observations made or followed 

 by him seems to show : 



First. In latitude 60 to 62, the snow-line at a short 

 distance from the coast may be considered to be 4,300 

 English feet, or thereabout ; secondly, in the same latitude, 

 60 to 62, towards the centre of the country, it rises to 

 5,300 ; thirdly, in latitude 67, in the interior, it is only 

 3,500 feet ; it is not much lower on insulated summits in 

 latitude 70, but on the coast it is as low as 2,900 feet. 



It is observed that the summer isothermal line shows a 

 marked tendency to run parallel to the peninsula, and to 

 this this trifling effect of latitude is in part attributable. 



Von Buch has remarked that in Norway and Lapland 

 the planes of vegetation of the pine and birch run nearly 



