136 FORESTRY OF NORWAY. 
sive or continental climates the precipitations arecompara- 
tively small. Thus, to take one illustration, in Iceland 
snow lies all the year at a height of only 3,100 feet, whilst 
in Norway, on the same parallel, the snow-line would 
approach 4000 feet. 
‘The same general principle holds good in the Southern 
Hemisphere ; its temperature on the whole being greatly 
inferior to that of the north (though the extremes are less). 
It acts towards the rest of the globe in some measure as 
the refrigeratory of a great distilling apparatus (as some 
one has correctly observed), and its higher latitudes are 
the seat of almost continual storms and fog, of which the 
climate of Cape Horn is a familiar example. Summer can 
there hardly be said to exist, and the snow-line is propor- 
tionally low. According to Sir James Ross, the first 
authority of his time on this subject, the snow-line does 
reach the level of the sea in the Antartic regions at a 
latitude between 67° and 71°, under which forests still 
grow in Norway, and even corn in some sheltered places.’ 
Forbes proceeds to give numerous estimates of the alti- 
tude of the snow-line in different parts of Norway, which 
may be of great value in the study of meteorology, but 
what we require is simply the substance of the’ whole; 
and a generalisation of the observations made or followed 
by him seems to show :— 
First. In latitude 60° to 62°, the snow-line at a short 
distance from the coast may be considered to be 4,300 
English feet, or thereabout; secondly, in the same latitude, 
60° to 62°, towards the centre of the country, it rises to 
5,800 ; thirdly, in latitude 67°, in the interior, it is only 
3,500 feet ; it is not much lower on insulated summits in 
latitude 70°, but on the coast it is as low as 2,900 feet. 
It is observed that the summer isothermal line shows a 
marked tendency to run parallel to the peninsula, and to 
this this trifling effect of latitude is in part attributable. 
Von Buch has remarked that in Norway and Lapland 
the planes of vegetation of the pine and birch ran nearly 
