As we travel northward, leaving the sunny lands of the temperate zone, we come after a time to mighty and seemingly endless forests of pines and firs. Mile after mile, they stretch away in a lonely silence. The wintry gale that rages among them is answered only by the howl of the wolf, while a few bears, reindeer, and the arctic fox, alone of animals, find a home in their snowy depths.

Gradually as we go onward the trees are more stunted, gradually the pines and firs give way to dwarfed willows, and soon we come to the barren grounds, a vast region extending about the pole, and greater in size than the whole continent of Europe. The boundary line of these barren grounds, is not everywhere equally distant from the pole. The temperature of arctic lands, like that of other climes, is affected greatly by the surrounding seas and by ocean currents. In the sea-girt peninsula of Labrador they reach their most extreme southerly point; and as a rule they extend southward where the land borders on the ocean, receding far to the northward in the centre of the continents.

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