6 KJELLMAN, THE ALG OF THE ARCTIC SEA. 
The general character of the vegetation. 
Number of individuals. The vegetation richest in individuals is found in the Polar 
Sea on the coasts of Norway. Here all those parts of at least the litoral and sublitoral 
zoues, Which are fit for the growth of algw, are clothed with dense masses of such 
plants. It may be stated broadly, that the tracts covered with alge are comparatively 
as large in the Norwegian Polar Sea as in the northern Atlantic on the coasts of 
Norway and Great Britain, and that the density of the vegetation is on the whole the 
same. If we except the Murman Sea in its most westerly portion and the White Sea, 
which two regions may most fitly, with regard to vegetation, be regarded as intermediate 
between the Norwegian Polar Sea and the Arctic Sea as understood here with strict 
reference to the geography of plants!), it is probable that the southern part of Baffin 
Bay along the west coast of Greenland is that part of the Arctic Sea whose vegetation 
comes next to that of the Norwegian Polar Sea in number of individuals. I do not 
know the vegetation here from personal observations, but by the collections I have 
examined and the informations given by investigators who have visited these regions, 
I am led to the opinion that on the west coast of Greenland, at least up to Disco Island 
or about Lat. N. 71°, there is a vegetation of algw which, though certainly inferior 
in extent and in number of individuals to that of the Norwegian Polar Sea, comes 
however next to it, and surpasses by far that of any other larger arctic region. Rink, the 
foremost knower and most accurate describer of the nature of Greenland, says in his 
work Grénland geographisk vg statistisk beskrevet. »The view presented by the sea, where 
it is clear, close on the coasts of Greenland is no less surprising. The bottom is over- 
grown with a forest of gigantic alge with leaves from six to eight ells long by a quarter 
of an ell broad, which together with the animal world moving between them remind 
one of the coral reefs of the tropical seas. Besides, the stones on the bottom are covered 
with corallaceous crusts *), and their cavities as well as the clay dredged up teem with 
animals». The opinion I have, in an earlier work, pronounced on the Flora of the Mur- 
man Sea on the west coast of south Novaya Zemlya and Waygats, has not been over- 
thrown by later observations. I said: The vegetation of alga is here poor in number 
of individuals, as compared with that on the coasts of Scandinavia. Large tracts of 
the sea-bottom are completely devoid of alge, or possess only an extremely poor, thin 
vegetation, although they are of such a nature that in other seas they would be covered 
with alex. The greatest part of those ranges of the bottom which in other seas are 
1) Cf. Gopi, Algenfl. weiss. Meer. and Crenxowsky, Bericht. 
) Lithothamnia. 
3) Rink, Grénland 1. p. 84. 
