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But let us see into what an inextricable labyrinth of difficulty we are led by this theory of plant-migration from the equatorial to the sub-arctic zone, and vice-versa, and even beyond the equator to the sub-antarctic zone, and still vice versa.
The Arctic zone retains few of the sub-arctic forms and its vegetation generally corresponds to what we call alpine shrubs, grasses, etc. The North Polar zone shows few signs of vegetation and is thought to be entirely devoid of shrubs. A few small herbacious perennials of the most extreme dwarf habit, with a few lichens and mosses, constitute its entire vegetation.
We enjoy superb, sub-arctic sunsets, with the profile of the city stamped in indigo upon a sky of luminous green. The wind may still be cold, but there is a briskness in the air that stirs good blood. People do not all look equally sour and downcast.
These were the birds we sought after in winter; but we could shoot for the table all the year round, for no sooner was it the duck's pairing and breeding season than another bird-population from their breeding- grounds in the arctic and sub-arctic regions came on the scene plover, sandpiper, godwit, curlew, whimbrel, a host of northern species that made the summer-dried pampas their winter abode.
Radisson's journey from England to Hudson Bay has been treated of in an earlier chapter: it is preferable to follow out to its finish the great, western impulse of the French, which led them to neglect for a time the doings of the British on the east coast of North America and in the sub-Arctic regions of Hudson Bay.
And these materials show that varieties of the Sequoia, the tulip-tree, oaks, beeches, walnuts, firs, poplars, hazelnuts, etc., etc., all flourished in these sub-arctic regions during the far-distant period we have named.
Few things, if any, in the history of the Empire equal the hardiness, the courage and endurance manifested in the great patrols of the Police into the ice-bound regions of the Arctic and sub-Arctic areas of Canada. For years the explorers who have searched for the Poles have been the heroes of many a story of thrilling influence on the minds of readers.
Freight, by Indian-back, over Chilcoot to Lake Linderman, had jumped from sixteen to thirty cents a pound, which latter was a rate of six hundred dollars a ton. And the sub-arctic winter gloomed near at hand. All knew it, and all knew that of the twenty thousand of them very few would get across the passes, leaving the rest to winter and wait for the late spring thaw.
And to this continuity of the circumpolar land, and to the consequent freedom for intermigration under a more favourable climate, I attribute the necessary amount of uniformity in the sub-arctic and northern temperate productions of the Old and New Worlds, at a period anterior to the Glacial epoch.
There appeared in the papers caricatures of every gigantic and imaginary creature, from the white whale, the terrible "Moby Dick" of sub-arctic regions, to the immense kraken, whose tentacles could entangle a ship of five hundred tons and hurry it into the abyss of the ocean. The legends of ancient times were even revived.
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