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interesting to us as Ethnologists. The specimens you see 

 before you on the table were collected by me during the 

 voyage to which I have alluded, and I intend, at present, 

 merely Lo call your attention to the external differences you 

 will perceive between them and their representatives which 

 have been grown in a more southern latitude. I am not 

 going deeply into this subject. I have often said that if each 

 lecturer, or author of a paper, were content to impress one 

 single point on the memory of his hearers, he would do more 

 good than by entering into the more abstruse details, which 

 are so hard to avoid. Now the point I want to impress on 

 you to-night is the very marked difference in size which 

 occurs in plants when they are grown in very high latitudes, or 

 what is nearly the same thing, at great heights above the 

 sea-level. As you all know, whether you recede farther and 

 farther from the equator, or whether you ascend higher and 

 higher above the sea level, either in a balloon or up the sides 

 of a mountain, the result is the same, a steady decrease of 

 temperature, and thus we have the Flora of high mountain 

 ranges, closely coinciding with that of the extreme poles. 

 As the cold increases vegetation becomes less and less luxu- 

 riant; ferns diminish in size, and finally disappear; trees 

 dwindle down till only the hardy white Birch and the Pine 

 remain, which after pushihg out an advanced guard as far as 

 70 degrees North latitude in Norway completely disappear 

 and give place to grasses, and finally to cryptograms (mosses), 

 lichens, and microscopic fungi. Many of the specimens 

 before you are from Spitzbergen, the farthest north of any 

 known land. A wild, vast, bleak island, perpetually hemmed 

 in by ice, save where the genial influences of the Gulf Stream 

 thaw it away — on tis western and southern coasts. A region 

 almost entirely covered in perpetual ice and snow — where 

 human life is impossible, and where the ground, in even the 

 most favored localities, is never thawed deeper than two 

 inches below its surface. Here then is the most advanced 

 outpost of organic life, beyond stretches only a death-like 

 expanse of dreary ice. (Spitzbergen is not, you must recol- 

 lect, the tiny spot of earth one usually sees represented on the 

 maps; it extends over 10 degrees of latitude, and is in con- 

 sequence larger than Ireland or even England). When I 

 remind you that there is total night in Spitzbergen for four 



