THE GREAT ALEUTIAN CHAIN. 149 



save the very highest peaks, are clothed in an indescribably rich 

 green and golden carpet of circumpolar sphagnum ; exquisitely- 

 colored lichens* adorn the stony sea-bluffs and precipices inland. 

 Every minute of the ship's progress in a free, fair wind shifts the 

 fascinating scene a new peak, another bold headland, a narrow 

 pass, unfolds now between two islets that just before apparently 

 were solid and as united as one island could be ; a steamy jet of 

 hot-spring vapor rises from a deeper, richer mass of green and gold 

 than that surrounding it, and a dark-brownish column of smoke 

 that issues from a lofty, cloud-encircled summit in the distance is 

 the burning crater of Akootan. 



Everything is so open here, is so plain to see, that when you try 

 to find some points of resemblance to that picture which has chal- 

 lenged your admiration in the Sitkan archipelago, you find noth- 

 ing absolutely nothing in common effect. It is, nevertheless, 



* The range and diverse beauties of the numerous mosses and lichens on 

 these islands must serve as an agreeable and interesting study to anyone who 

 lias the slightest love for nature. They undoubtedly formed the first covering 

 to the naked rocks, after these basaltic foundations had been reared upon and 

 above the bed of the sea bare and naked cliffs and boulders, which with 

 calm intrepidity presented their callous fronts to the powerful chisels of the 

 Frost King. Rain, wind, and thawing moods destroyed their iron-bound 

 strongness ; particles larger and finer, washed down and away, made a surface 

 of soil which slowly became more and more capable of sustaining vegetable 

 life. "In this virgin earth," says an old author, "the wind brings a small 

 seed, which at first generates a diminutive moss, which, spreading by degrees, 

 with its tender and minute texture, resists, however, the most intense cold, 

 and extends over the whole a verdant velvet carpet. In fact, these mosses are 

 the medicines and the nurses of the other inhabitants of the vegetable king- 

 dom [in the North]. The bottom parts of the mosses, which perish and 

 moulder away yearly, mingling with the dissolved but as yet crude parts of 

 the earth, communicate to it organized particles, which contribute to the 

 growth and nourishment of other plants. They likewise yield salts and un- 

 guinous phlogistic particles for the nourishment of future vegetable colonies, 

 the seeds of other plants, which the sea and winds, or else the birds in their 

 plumage, bring from distant shores and scatter among the mosses.'' Then the 

 botanist needs no prompting when he observes the maternal care of these 

 mosses, which screen the tender new arrivals from the cold and imbue them 

 with the moisture which they have stored up, and " nourish them with their 

 own oily exhalations, so that they grow, increase, and at length bear seeds, 

 and afterward dying, add to the unguinous nutritive particles of the earth ; 

 and at the same time diffuse over this new earth and mosses more seeds, the 

 earnest of a numerous posterity." 



