Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 7.djvu/475

Rh ordinary track of pleasure-travel, is far less known or appreciated. Norway may, in fact, be styled with good reason the country of the glacier. True, the height of its mountains does not approximate to that of the Alps. Only one or two summits exceed 8,000 feet in altitude, and this elevation is not much more than half that of Mont Blanc. But almost the entire country stands high above the level of the ocean, while its situation so far toward the north enables the snowfields, which are the feeders of the glaciers, to retain their vast accumulations with little loss though rain or thaw.

If the reader will glance at a map of Norway, he will see that there are two well-defined divisions: the southern, a region not destitute of flourishing cities and towns; and the northern, a narrow strip consisting of little more than a succession of headlands and islands, stretching far within the Arctic Circle. Both divisions have their characteristic, that the mountain-ranges rise in the form of wide tablelands, extending for long distances in so nearly a perfect level "that, did roads exist, a coach-and-four might be driven along or across them for many miles." The very valleys that break up their continuity are unperceived by the eye, being overlooked on account of their narrowness; and the view is interrupted, only by slight undulations, or by occasional mountains of no great size. Here it is that, summer and winter, the moisture which elsewhere descends in the form of rain, spreads the successive layers of the great Sneefon. Prof. Forbes, in the map accompanying his interesting work on "The Glaciers of Norway," indicates not less than eighteen of these "chief permanent snowfields" to the south of Trondhjem, and nineteen in the narrow strip north of that city. It must not, however, be concluded too hastily that the climate of Norway is cold and inhospitable; for no greater contrast can be found between countries lying in the same latitude, than between Norway and Greenland. The influence of the Gulf Stream is nowhere more strikingly traced; for, if the summers in Christiania are comparatively cool, the winters are as warm as in many places far to the south of it. Indeed, it is the remarkably equable temperature of Norway which, while it prevents the harbors from being closed by drifting ice, like those of the opposite shores of Greenland, yet, allows the line of perpetual snow to come down as low as 4,000 or 5,000 feet above the sea-level. For it has been conclusively proved that it is not so much the intensity of the winter's cold, as the amount of the summer's heat, that fixes the point where frost reigns supreme throughout the year. So it happens that, while the haven of Bergen, in latitude 60°, is frozen over only twice or three times in a hundred years, or about as often as the same fate befalls the Seine at Paris, the eternal snows cover the mountain-sides in the neighborhood of Bergen at heights at which the peasant on the Jura or the Alps pastures his flocks through the long summer months.

Of late, the savants of Norway have been giving to the world the