Page:Polar Exploration - Bruce - 1911.djvu/100

96 flowering plants, but also because of the enormous amount of investigation that has been carried out by very many eminent botanists from every civilised nation. The literature of Arctic botany fills many shelves. In so much detail has Arctic flora been investigated, that it is quite a rare thing to record a new species, and even regarding distribution there is little more to be learnt. The present interest is the study of the physiology of Arctic plants, and here a beginning has already been made. Under these circumstances it is neither necessary nor desirable to enumerate even in the most general way species of Arctic plants nor to discuss their distribution more than I have done already in the case of the diatoms of the Arctic seas and floes.

But plant life in Arctic lands is a feature of such importance that it must not be passed by without giving some consideration to it in a general way. One striking feature is, that no matter how far north the explorer goes, no matter how desolate a region he visits, he is sure to come across one or more species of flowering plants. A poppy, buttercup, or saxifrage is almost certain to be met with, and of all these the Arctic poppy (Papaver radicatum) is perhaps the most persistent. There is no place that I have visited in Spitsbergen, Franz Josef Land, Novaya Zemlya, or