24 MODSEN t-OREST ECONOMY. 



whole district of its shade; but vegetable life once destroyed 

 revives only with difficulty upon this frozen soil. 



'In Norway the forests are more extensive; they are 

 suspended along the Scandinavian Alps, which separate 

 this country from Sweden. The birch reaches there an 

 altitude of 365 metres. In the diocese of Bergen the fir 

 has still those gigantic proportions of the forests of Swit- 

 zerland and Germany ; but more to the north its size is 

 diminished to stunted proportions, and at the Polar Circle 

 it has totally disappeared ; whilst in Swedish Lapland it 

 advances yet to two degrees beyond. 



' In Norway it is the birch that really serves as a ladder 

 to vegetation ; it is the measure of its energy, and marks 

 by the dififerent states through which it passes, in propor- 

 tion as it rises in altitude, the degree of weakness of 

 vegetative life. To the weeping birch succeeds the betula 

 acer, which replaces the white birch ; after which comes 

 the birch of the prairies, which passes in its turn through 

 different gradations of size, and which at the Polar Circle 

 is nothing more than a stunted shrub, of pyramidal form, 

 and covered with moss. 



' The Peninsula of Jutland, which in the eleventh cen- 

 tury Adam of Bremen designated as horrida sylvis, has 

 gradually lost the greatest part of its woods. One would 

 now seek for them in vain upon the western coast of 

 Schleswig. All the marsh which extends as far as the 

 Eider is completely despoiled of trees. The eastern coast 

 is a little less so, although the woods, almost wholly of 

 beech, are very thinly scattered. 



' When we leave Denmark, and re-enter Germany by 

 Holstein, forests become more numerous. Yet the Duchy 

 of Oldenburg announces already, by the rarity of its trees, 

 the vicinity of the Netherlands, where the marsh no longer 

 permits the appearance of forests. 



