KONGL. SV. VET. AKADEMIENS HANDLINGAR. BAND 2Q. N:0 5. 21 
development and for others to develop so well as they would do under other circumstances. 
Besides, on account of this long interruption in the period of vegetation, it be- 
comes impossible for all other alge to grow on this part of the bottom than those 
which possess such organs of reproduction as enable them to rest, without injury, during 
a long part of the year, exposed to a low temperature. 
The same region of the bottom, but also its deeper parts, above all the upper part of 
the sublitoral zone, is subjected to the action of the drift-ice, when it lies still along the 
coasts, or floats quietly along them, or is rolled on with tremendous violence by the furious 
waves, mighty masses of ice being thrown or screwed high up on the shores, leaving the 
bottom, where they have passed, bare and desolate. The drift-ice always exercises a friction 
now feebler now stronger on the bottom nearest the shores, by which friction the marine 
vegetation is decimated, masses of mud and small shingle are formed, and rocks and stones 
are smoothed and, as it were, polished. I believe that the scarcity of alge within the litoral 
zone and the upper part of the sublitoral in the greater part of the Arctic Sea depends on 
this pernicious influence of the ice. The known algologist Dickir has a priori arrived 
at the same conclusion. In his description of a collection of algw brought together in 
the American Arctic Sea during one of the English arctic expeditions, he says: »The 
number of litoral species in such regions must be few or in many places altogether 
absent; the continual abrading influence of bergs and pack-ice would effectually prevent 
their growth.»*) That difference in the distribution of the vegetation among the several 
bottom-zones, which appears in different parts of the Arctic Sea, seems thus to be essentially 
connected with a difference in the character of the ice, in such a manner that if the other 
circumstances are the same, a more equal distribution of the vegetation on the sublitoral 
and the litoral zones takes place, if the ice is more favourable. With regard to the 
formation and drifting of ice, the Norwegian Polar Sea is most favourably situated of 
all parts of the Arctic Sea. Ice is never formed here in greater quantities, nor does 
the polar ice set down here. In the White Sea ice is formed during the winter, 
but in the summer the water is free from ice. The state of the ice within the rest of 
the Arctic Sea may be regarded as being, on the whole, pretty much the same. In the 
eastern part of the Greenland Sea along the west coast of Spitzbergen, in the eastern 
part of the Murman Sea, and in the eastern part of Baftin Bay, the state of the ice is 
relatively favourable in summer, in the two first-mentioned regions in consequence of 
the Gulf-stream, in the so-called North-Greenland on account of the westerly direction 
of the ice-current, after it has turned Cape Farewell. However, even here the sea is 
probably no year free from ice even in summer, though it is not so compact nor packed 
on to the coasts in so large quantities as to make them inaccessible during any year. 
The arctic expeditions of the later years have shown that the sea off the east coast of 
Novaya Zemlya and the north coast of Siberia is rich in ice, though near the coasts it 
is less thick and more divided. Such is especially the case before the mouths of the 
great Siberian rivers, where during the summer-months the main mass of the polar ice 
is kept from the land by currents flowing in an easterly direction, and the coast ice 
1) Dickte, Alg. Sutherl. 2, p. 200. 
