168 THE FOREST LANDS OF NORTHERN RUSSIA. 
sation of hunger until we got to sleep; but it was found 
to produce afterwards a painful diarrhoea. Besides this 
unpleasant effect, fragments of gravel, which were mixed 
with the mosses, tried our teeth. We picked the plants 
from the rock with our knives, or a piece of hoop-iron; 
and we could not avoid breaking of some particles of the 
stone.” 
‘These lichens are black and leather-like, studded with 
small black points like “coiled wire buttons,” and attached 
either by an umbilical root or by short and tenacious 
fibres to the rocks. Some of them may be compared to a 
piece of shagreen, while others resemble a fragment of 
burned skin. They are met with in cold bleak localities, 
on Alpine heights of granite or micaceous schist, in-almost 
all parts of the world,—on the Scottish mountains, on the 
Andes, on the Himalayas; but it is in the Polar world 
that they most abound, spreading over the surface of 
every rock a sombre Plutonian vegetation, that seems to 
have been scathed by fire and flame, until all its beauty 
and richness were shrivelled up.’ 
In Sweden, while several of the lichens produced in 
these regions are employed as dyes, others are used as 
medicine, and some as poisons for noxious and dangerous 
animals which are found annoying. 
‘The only lichen which has retained its place in modern 
pharmacy is the well-known “Iceland moss.” It is still 
employed as a tonic and febrifuge in ague; but more 
largely, when added to soups and chocolate, as an article 
of diet for the feeble and consumptive. In Iceland the 
Cetraria Islandica is highly valued by the inhabitants. 
What barley, rye, and cats are to the Indo-Caucasian races 
of Asia and Western Europe; the olive, the fig, and the 
grape to the inhabitants of the Mediterranean basin; rice 
to the Hindu; the tea-plant to the native of the Flowery 
Land; and the date-palm to the Arab,—is Iceland moss 
to the Icelander, the Lapp, and the Eskimo, 
It is found on some of the loftiest peaks of the Scottish 
