FLORA, 173 
‘We noticed, he says,‘about one hundredand seventy phaner- 
ogamous or flowering plants; being one-fifth of the num- 
ber of species which exist fifteen degrees of latitude 
further to the southward. He adds: The grasses, bents, 
and rushes, constitute only one-fifth of the species on the 
coast, but the two former tribes actually cover more 
ground than all the rest of the vegetation. The cruciferae, 
or cross-like tribe, afford one-seventh of the species, and the 
compound flowers are nearly as numerous. The shrubby 
plants that reach the sea-coast are the common juniper, 
two species of willow, the dwarf birch, the common alder, 
the hippophaé, the gooseberry, the red bear berry (arbutus 
uva urst), the Labrador tea-plant, the Lapland rose, the 
bog-whortleberry, and the crowberry. The kidney-leaved 
oxyria grows in great abundance there, and occasionally 
furnished us with an agreeable addition to our meals, as it 
resembles the garden-sorrel in flavour, but is more juicy 
and tender. It is eaten by the natives, and must, as well 
as many of the cress-like plants, prove an excellent correc- 
tive of the gross, oily, rancid, and frequently putrid meat 
on which they subsist. The small balls of the Alpine bis- 
tort, and the long, succulent, and sweet roots of many of 
the astragaleee, which grow on the sandy shores, are eat- 
able; butit does not seem that the Eskimos are acquainted 
with their use. A few clumps of white spruce-fir, with 
some straggling black spruces and canoe-birches, grow at 
the distance of twenty or thirty miles from the sea, in 
sheltered situations on the banks of rivers. 
‘It has been pointed out that the principal characteristic 
of the vegetation of the Arctic regions is the predomin- 
ance of perennial and cryptogamous plants; but further 
southward, where night begins to alternate with day, or 
in what may be called the sub-arctic zone, a difftrence of 
species appears which greatly enhances the beauty of the 
landscape. A richly and vividly-coloured flora adorns 
these latitudes in Europe as well as in Asia during their 
brief but ardent suminer, with its intense radiance and 
