209 



ocean, ice, and heavy snow-drifts, the rock presents a surface 

 about as black as coal, without even a moss or Hchen to enliven 

 its somber gloom. But when this dreary barrier is passed the 

 surface features of the country in general are found to be finely 

 moulded and collocated, smooth valleys, wide as compared with 

 their depth, trending back from the shore to a range of mountains 

 that appear blue in the distance, and round-topped hills, with 

 their side curves finely drawn, touching and blending in beautiful 

 groups, while scarce a single rock-pile is seen or sheer-walled 

 blufif to break the general smoothness. 



The soil has evidently been derived mostly from the under- 

 lying slates, though a few fragmentary wasting moraines were 

 observed, containing traveled boulders of quartz and granite 

 which doubtless were brought from the mountains of the interior 

 by glaciers that have recently vanished — so recently that the 

 outlines and sculptured hollows and grooves of the mountains 

 have not as yet suffered sufficient post-glacial denudation to 

 mar appreciably their glacial characters. 



The banks of the river at the mouth of which we landed pre- 

 sented a striking contrast as to vegetation to that of any other 

 stream we had seen in the Arctic regions. The tundra vegeta- 

 tion was not wholly absent, but the mosses and lichens of which 

 it is elsewhere composed are about as feebly developed as pos- 

 sible, and instead of forming a continuous covering they occur 

 in small separate tufts, leaving the ground between them raw 

 and bare as that of a newly ploughed field. The phanerogamous 

 plants, both on the lowest grounds and on the slopes and hilltops 

 as far as seen, were in the same severely repressed condition, 

 and as sparsely planted in tufts an inch or two in diameter, 

 with from one to three feet of naked soil betv\'een them. Some 

 portions of the coast, however, farther south, presented a greenish 

 hue as seen from the ship at a distance of eight or ten miles, 

 owing no doubt to vegetation growing under less unfavorable 

 conditions. 



From an area of about half a square mile the following plants 

 were collected : 



