INTRODUCTION. bat 
with garlands of the minutest and humblest plants ; 
they are the tapestry, the highly-wrought carpet- 
ing laid down in the vestibules of nature’s palaces. 
The vast mountain-systems of the globe, with 
their culminating regions in the Andes, Alps, and 
Himalayas, and their subsidiary branches or ribs 
in the Grampian, Dovrefjeld, Ural, and Atlantic 
ranges, are clothed on their sides, summits, and 
elevated plateaus, almost exclusively with crypto- 
gamic vegetation, and enable us to form some con- 
ception of the immense altitudinal range of these 
plants. Then there are whole islands in the Arctic 
and Antarctic Oceans whose vegetation also is 
almost entirely cellular. The northern portion of 
Lapland, the continent of Greenland, the large 
islands of Spitzbergen, Nova Zembla, and Iceland, 
the extensive territories of the Hudson’s Bay Com- 
pany, the enormous tracts of level land which 
border the Polar Ocean from the North Cape to 
Behring’s Straits, across the north of Europe and 
Asia, and from Behring’s Straits to Greenland, 
across the north of America, a stretch of many 
thousands of miles ; all these immense areas of the 
earth’s surface—where not a tree, nor a shrub, nor 
a flower is seen, except the creeping arctic willow 
and birch, and the stunted moss-like saxifrage and 
scurvy grass—are covered with fields of lichens and 
mosses, far exceeding anything that can be com- 
