30 



ARCTIC PROVINCE. 



in winter is equivalent to the typical, or main por- 

 tion of this Arctic province, and the line of the 

 winter ice to the boundary of that section of it. The 

 shores of Norway, or rather Finmark and Nordland, 

 from the North Cape to the Arctic Circle, are 

 debatable ground, sharing in the features of the 

 Boreal province, yet presenting besides such marked 

 indications of the Arctic fauna, that I think it best 

 to include them here. 



In this realm, where King Frost holds despotic 

 sway, where the long year is longest, and yet con- 

 sists of but a day and a night, where man shrivels 

 into a dwarf, and has plainly no just claim to a do- 

 minion, the power of the Creator has called forth 

 the mightiest and the minutest of the inhabitants 

 of the ocean. The kinds of living things there are 

 few, but those few display peculiarities which mark 

 them as members of an assemblage of organized 

 shapes, whose home and birth-place are in the icy 

 seas. The polar regions are not negations so far as 

 animated nature is concerned. Bleak and desolate, 

 cold and dreary as they are, they do not consti- 

 tute merely the boundaries of the regions of life \ 

 they have their own peculiar beast-people on land 

 and in the sea. They are no deserts whence the 

 Caller-forth of life has been absent ; among the 

 glassy icebergs there has been a genesis. 



" That sea-beast 

 Leviathan, which God of all his works 

 Created hugest that swim the ocean stream," 



