t of trees in the Yenesej
region, even during our geological period, went further north than
now, perhaps as far as, in consequence of favourable local
circumstances, it now goes on the Lena.

[Illustration: SUB-FOSSIL MARINE CRUSTACEA FROM THE TUNDRA. ]

On the slopes of the steep _tundra_ bank and in several of the _tundra_
valleys there is an exceedingly rich vegetation, which already, only 100
kilometres south of Yefremov Kamen, forms actual thickets of flowering
plants, while the _tundra_ itself is overgrown with an exceedingly
scanty carpet, consisting more of mosses than of grasses. Salices of
little height go as far north as Port Dickson (73 deg. 30' N.L.), the dwarf
birch (_Betula nana_, L.) is met with, though only as a bush creeping
along the ground, at Cape Schaitanskoj (72 deg. 8' N.L.); and here in 1875,
on the ice-mixed soil of the _tundra_, we gathered ripe cloudberries.
Very luxuriant alders (_Alnaster fruticosus_, LEDEB.) occur already at
Mesenkin (71 deg. 28' N.L.), and the Briochov Islands (70 deg. to 71 deg. N.L.), are
in several places covered with rich and luxuriant thickets of bushes.
But the limit of trees proper is considered to begin first at the great
bend which the river makes in 69 deg. 40' N.L., a little north of Dudino.
Here the hills are covered with a sort of wood consisting of
half-withered, grey, moss-grown larches (_Larix sibirica_), which seldom
reach a height of more than seven to ten metres, and which much less
deserve the name of trees than the luxuriant alder bushes which grow
nearly 2 deg. farther north. But some few miles south of this place, and
still far north of the Arctic Circle, the pine forest becomes tall. Here
begins a veritable forest, the greatest the earth has to show, extending
with little interruption from the Ural to the neighbourhood of the Sea
of Ochotsk, and from the fifty-eighth or fifty-ninth degree of latitude
to far north of the Arctic Circle, that is to say, about one thousand
kilometres from north to south, and perhaps four times as much from east
to west. It is a primeval forest of enormous extent, nearly untouched by
the axe of the cultivator, but at many places devastated by extensive
forest fires.

On the high eastern bank of the Yenisej the forest begins
immediately at the river bank. It consists principally of pines: the
cembra pine (_Pinus Cembra_, L.), valued for its seeds, enormous
larches, the nearly awl-formed Siberian pine (_Pinus sibirica_