KJELLMAN, THE ALG^ OF THE AKCTIC SEA. 



The general character of the vegetation. 



Number of individuals. The vegetation richest in individuals is found in the Polar 

 Sea on the coasts of Norway. Here all those parts of at least the litoral and sublitoral 

 zones, which are fit for the growth of algae, are clothed with dense masses of such 

 plants. It may be stated broadly, that the tracts covered with algse are comparatively 

 as large in the Norwegian Polar Sea as in the northern Atlantic on the coasts of 

 Norway and Great Britain, and that the density of the vegetation is on the whole the 

 same. If we except the Murraan Sea in its most westerly portion and the White Sea, 

 which two regions may most fitly, with regard to vegetation, be regarded as intermediate 

 between the Norwegian Polar Sea and the Arctic Sea as understood here with strict 

 reference to the geography of plants '), it is probable that the southern part of Baffin 

 Bay along the west coast of Greenland is that part of the Arctic Sea whose vegetation 

 comes next to that of the Norwegian Polar Sea in number of individuals. I do not 

 know the vegetation here from personal observations, but by the collections I have 

 examined and the informations given by investigators who have visited these regions, 

 I am led to the opinion that on the west coast of Greenland, at least up to Disco Island 

 or about Lat. N. 71°, there is a vegetation of algte which, though certainly inferior 

 in extent and in number of individuals to that of the Norwegian Polar Sea, comes 

 however next to it, and surpasses by far that of any other larger arctic region. Rink, the 

 foremost knower and most accurate describer of the nature of Greenland, says in his 

 work Grbnland geographisk og statistisk beskrevet. ))The view presented by the sea, where 

 it is clear, close on the coasts of Greenland is no less surprising. The bottom is over- 

 grown with a forest of gigantic algse with leaves from six to eight ells long by a quarter 

 of an ell broad, which together with the animal world moving between them remind 

 one of the coral reefs of the tropical seas. Besides, the stones on the bottom are covered 

 with corallaceous crusts ^), and their cavities as well as the clay dredged up teem with 

 animals)). The opinion I have, in an earlier work, pronounced on the Flora of the Mur- 

 man Sea on the west coast of south Novaya Zemlya and Waygats, has not been over- 

 thrown by later observations. I said: The vegetation of algaj is here poor in number 

 of individuals, as compared with that on the coasts of Scandinavia. Large tracts of 

 the sea-bottom are completely devoid of algje, or possess only an extremely poor, thin 

 vegetation, although they are of such a nature that in other seas they would be covered 

 with algae. The greatest part of those ranges of the bottom which in other seas are 



') Cf. Gobi, Algenfl. weiss. Meer. and Cibnkowsky, Bericht. 



^) Lithothamnia. 



') Rink, Gronland 1. p. 84. 



