138 



THE NATURALIST. 



qiiented by sea-bixds, where the guano both warms the soil, and favours 

 vegetation, Ranunculus, Cochlearea, and grasses sometimes attain to the 

 height of several inches, and in the midst of fallen rocks, a yellow poppy, 

 Papaver nudicaule, is sometimes found, rivalling some of our garden 

 favourites, tree or shrub is anywhere to be seen ; the last of these, the 

 white birch, and the pine being last found in Norway in 7 0° K. lat. Still some 

 of the plants have a woody texture ; as two species of low growing willows, 

 one of which Salix reticulata, is found also on the Alps, and a low shrub, 

 Empetrum nigrum, growing amongst the damp mosses, is also found on the 

 peaty moors of Europe, as far south as Spain and Italy. The remaining 

 plants are of very humble growth, and without stems ; many of them so 

 small as almost to escape the eyes of the botanist, unless he looks carefully 

 for them ; the proof of this may be seen in the slow growth of the list of 

 phanerogamous plants found in Spitzbergen, which has only been completed, 

 little by little, from the successive researches of the travellers who have 

 visited these islands. Thus, in 1675, Frederick Martens of Hamburg, des- 

 cribed and figured only eleven species of terrestrial plants ; and Phipps in 

 1775 reports only twelve which were named and described by Solander. 

 Scoresby, being almost wholly on the sea, the total number of species gathered 

 by him only reaches fifteen, described in 1820 by the celebrated Eobert 

 Brown. In 1833, Captain, now General Sabine, gathered twenty-four, which 

 were determined by Sir William Hooker, who also examined and described 

 the forty species collected by Parry in 1827, during a six months sojourn 

 in the north of Spitzbergen. Then Sommerfelt named forty-two species 

 brought by Keilhan, the same year, from the southern half, and from Bear 

 Island. In 1838 and 1839 a Danish botanist, M. Vahl, and myself, gathered 

 fifty-seven species in Bell Sound, Magdalena Bay and Smeerenberg. The 

 voyage of M.M. Torrell, I^'ordenskiold, and Quennerstedt, in 1858 enriched 

 the flora by six new species, and the Swedish Scientific Commission in 1861, 

 by twenty-one. M. Malmgren, the botanist of the expedition, in eliminating 

 the synonymy, and distinguishing the species confirmed by his predecessors, 

 raised the total number of the phanerogamic plants to ninety-three, 



I am taking no notice of the Cryptogamia — the mosses which carpet 

 the bottoms of humid depressions, and cover the turfy morasses, nor of the 

 lichens which grow upon the stones up to the summit of the mountains, and 

 resist the most rigorous cold ; for the greater part of them are never unco- 

 vered by the snow. M. Lindblom made the number of these one hundred 

 and fifty-two, before the two last Swedish expeditions. We thus see the law, 

 propounded by Linneus, that the Cryptogamia predominate towards the 



