3G2 
jra n. d. geldart ox rlants collected by 
a temperature as — 53°, and often from — 38° to — 48^ for several 
days together, and on the mainland in the same latitude the Great 
Slave Lake is frozen for six months out of the twelve ; and the ice 
in winter is never less than five and often eight to nine feet thick ; 
but at the Fieroes the ice on the ponds is seldom so strong that a 
jierson can walk on it with safety. At Digges Island we find 
about sixty or seventy flowering plants altogether, including 
Ur. Bell’s list. At the Bieroes we find over three hundred, and at 
the Sogne Fiord about six hundred and sevent}". At Digges Island 
and at the Fceroes there is not a single tree, but at Sogne Fiord 
there are forest trees in abundance. Elm, Oak, Alder, Birch, Fir, 
Pine, and Yew, and favoured by the extraordinary physical forma- 
tion of the conntiy in which deej) narrow valleys extend from the sea 
level, within a short horizontal space to the snow line, jDeaks of 8400 
feet high, being within nine miles of the sea shore ; the summer 
heat in the valleys becomes often almost tropical, although a glacier 
in one of them descends to within 425 feet of the sea level. On 
the old moraines of glaciers in these valleys the Alpine flora descends 
to within about 100 feet of the sea level, but in the valleys them- 
selves grow Vines, Peaches, Apricots, Walnuts, and wild woods of 
Primus nvinm, and there is the largest orchard in Scandinavia ; in 
fact the narrow valleys are natural hothouses, from the heat of the 
sun reverberated by tlie steep black rocks; the Alpine plants taking 
advantage of the shady northern sides of the deep rifts. Even so 
far north as Spitsbergen, which in latitude approaches that of 
Floeberg Beach, there are 111 flowering plants as compared with 
32. How if in our own time we find such differences of climate 
as these, with corresponding differences of flora, produced in the 
same latitude by the action of currents and the physical arrangement 
of the land — we surely need search no further for the conditions 
which have produced in more or less remote geological periods the 
flora which we know by its fossil remains to have existed in those 
regions nearest to the Pole from which we have any records — than 
altered relations of currents, and the position and elevation of land. 
There appears to be no necessity to invoke the extraordinary agency 
* This estimate of “sixty or seventy ” .speeies is arrived at thus; Captain 
]\Iarkham finds forty species, including Endogens, Dr. Dell about twenty 
more Exogens, and no doubt there will bo a few more Endogens than those 
included in Captain Markham’s list. 
