sed for
an uneducated memory. It is no wonder, therefore, that the Finn knows
very little except about what happened during his own life, or, at best,
his father's. I never heard the Kalewala spoken of, and doubt very much
whether it is known to the natives of this region. The only songs we
heard, north of Haparanda, were hymns--devout, but dismal. There must be
ballads and household songs yet alive, but the recent spiritual fever
has silenced them for the time.

I was at first a little surprised to find the natives of the North so
slow, indolent and improvident. We have an idea that a cold climate is
bracing and stimulating--_ergo_, the further north you go, the more
active and energetic you will find the people. But the touch of ice is
like that of fire. The tropics relax, the pole benumbs, and the
practical result is the same in both cases. In the long, long winter,
when there are but four hours of twilight to twenty of darkness--when
the cows are housed, the wood cut, the hay gathered, the barley bran and
fir bark stowed away for bread, and the summer's catch of fish
salted--what can a man do, when his load of wood or hay is hauled home,
but eat, gossip and sleep? To bed at nine, and out of it at eight in the
morning, smoking and dozing between the slow performance of his few
daily duties, he becomes at last as listless and dull as a hibernating
bear. In the summer he has perpetual daylight, and need not hurry.
Besides, why should he give himself special trouble to produce an
unusually large crop of flax or barley, when a single night may make his
labours utterly profitless? Even in midsummer the blighting frost may
fall: nature seems to take a cruel pleasure in thwarting him: he is
fortunate only through chance; and thus a sort of Arab fatalism and
acquiescence in whatever happens, takes possession of him. His
improvidence is also to be ascribed to the same cause. Such fearful
famine and suffering as existed in Finland and Lapland during the winter
of 1856-7 might no doubt have been partially prevented, but no human
power could have wholly forestalled it.

The polar zone was never designed for the abode of man. In the
pre-Adamite times, when England was covered with palm-forests, and
elephants ranged through Siberia, things may have been widely different,
and the human race then (if there was any) may have planted vineyards on
these frozen hills and lived in bamboo huts. But since the geological
_emeutes_ and rev