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290 correspond very closely to those of the Asiatic continent, while those of Madagascar are extremely unlike the African forms, although the distance from the continent is less in the latter case than in the former. And if we compare the three great islands, Sumatra, Borneo and Celebes, lying, as it were, side by side, in the same ocean we find that the former two, although farthest apart, have almost identical productions, while the latter two, though closer together, are more unlike than Britain and Japan, situated in different oceans and separated by the largest of the great continents (Wallace).

These unexpected results warranted the inference that the contrasted areas, despite their nearness to each other, had, for long periods, been severed, and that those, on the other hand, which were widely sundered had been at some time, in some way, united by intermediate connecting land surfaces.

Iceland is an island of most respectable proportions—a little larger than Ireland; it occupies a position on the earth's surface especially interesting from its arctic relations, it furnishes sensational contrasts by reason of the union, within its limits, of the opposed empires of frost and fire; its plant life has European affinities; its insect life is restricted, but also European; its bird life has a European expression, but pertains also to the circumpolar distribution of identical birds in both hemispheres; its geological history is recent and startling, and its scenery strange and magnificent. It is, therefore, not surprising that it attracts scientific and adventuresome visitors, though it seems to the writer that these would naturally increase if, at least in America, this island received some sort of popular elucidation. Such is the purpose of this article.

Besides the especial wonders of its bold and frowning cliffs, its ice-buried mountains and its foaming and tempestuous rivers, Iceland for centuries has been the home of romance. Baring Gould was perhaps the first modern English writer who appreciated and adequately described the bewildering impressions made by Iceland upon a visitor, though he failed to see its most marvelous aspects, and he pays his tribute of praise very well indeed. It was our own Bayard Taylor who, somewhat later, on the pages of the New York-Tribune, remarked,

not that there is no interest in Iceland itself. On the contrary, the handful of old Scandinavians there preserve for the scholars of our day a philological and historical interest, such as no equal number of men have ever achieved in the annals of the world. A thousand years ago they cut loose from Europe and carried the most virile elements of its past almost out of reach of later changes. But Iceland is so remote from us, in an intellectual as well as a material sense, that any satisfactory knowledge of it requires a special appropriation of time and study.

The easier and more common way to Iceland, the one taken by the writer, is by the United Steamship Co.'s steamers (the Danish mail line), which leave Copenhagen, at frequent intervals during the