64 FORESTRY OF NORWAY. 
from his volume entitled The Plant: a Biography, supplies 
interesting illustrations of what has thus been advanced : — 
‘If from the snow-covered ice plains of the extreme 
north, where the red snow algae alone reminds us of the 
existence of vegetable organisation, we turn towards the 
south, a girdle first expands before us, in which mosses 
and lichens clothe the soil, and a peculiar vegetation of 
low plants, with. subterranean perennial stems, and 
generally large handsome flowers, the so-called Alpine 
plants, gives a special character to nature. Almost all 
the plants form little flattened separate tufts; Pyrola, 
Andromeda, Pedieularis, Cochlearia, poppies, crowfoots, and 
others, are the characteristic genera of this flora, in which 
no tree, no shrub, is found. Leaving this region, which 
botanists call the region of mosses and saxifrages, we go 
southward, and at first we see little low bushes of birches, 
then more compact woods, into which the pines and 
other coniferous trees assemble, and we at last find our- 
selves in a second great zone of vegetation, which is 
characterised by the woods consisting almost exclusively 
of conifers, which thus impress a peculiar character upon 
the flora ; firs and pines, Siberian stone pines and larches, 
form great widely extended masses of forest ; by brooks 
and on damp soil occur the willow and the alder. On 
hi lls grow the reindeer lichen and the Iceland moss. In 
the cranberry, cloudberry (Rubus Chamaemorus), and the 
currant, nature gives spontaneously, though sparingly, food ; 
and a rich flora of variegated flowers serves for the decora- 
tion of the zone, which stretches in Scandinavia to the 
northern limit of the cultivation of wheat, but in Russia 
and Asia almost to Kazan and Yakutsk; this we may 
call the zone of the conifers. To the south of this zone 
in Norway, so far north even as in the neighbourhood of 
Dr onthiem, lat. 64° 15’, the culture of fruit begins, 
though sparingly; soon appear the sturdy oak and woods 
of beech. In about the latitude of Frankfort-on-the-Maine, 
50, 9', another tree joins company, which, in its bold 
p icturesque mode of branching, takes its stand beside the 
