The universal geography : earth and its inhabitants

ARCTIC RUSSIA. 843stretching southwards, and nowhere attaining an elevation of more than 300 feet.But the schists are separated from the southern masses by intervening Jurassicformations, said to contain naphtha springs, besides beds of pyrites and copper.Kanin was formerly an island, and the rivers Chiya, flowing west to the Gulf ofMezen, and Cheshcha, flowing east to Cheskaya Bay, both had their source, ahundred years ago, in the same lake, so that boats could easily cross from shoreto shore. The lake is now a mere swamp, and all through navigation has ceased, achange doubtless due to the general upheaval going on all along the north coast ofRussia. The old strait was firstchanged into a lake with a doubleoutlet, and this lake was thentransformed to a swamp betweenKanin Peninsula.two rivers.Besides the Timan range theprovince of Archangelis crossedby a few low ridges connectedwith the Ural system, but nowhererising above GOO feet, except inthe immediate vicinity of themain chain. Nor is the contrastbetween the hills and the lowlandsvery marked.For over half theyear hills, plains, lakes, marshes,are shrouded in a uniform mantleof snow, while the briefsummervegetation is everywhere of thesame uniform character.Nearlyall the land as far as the sixtysixthparallel is still covered withforests, whose relative value isyearly increased according as thecentral regions become more andmore disafforested.Fifteen-sixteenthsof the province of Vologdaare under timber, mainly conifers_____ 25 Miles.and birch, and this proportion is continued in the southern districts of Archangel.All the heights are wooded, and the Russian word gora, like the Ziryanian parma,means " hill " or " wood " indifferently, as in South America do the terms monte ormontana, and Wahl in many parts of Germany.But farther north trees are replacedby shrubs, and these by creeping plants, whose scanty foliage seeks a shelterbeneath the tufts of red ochre or pale white mosses. Here are the vast solitudesknown by the Ziryanian term tundra, or rather trundra—that is, " treeless land "resembling those of North Siberia, though with a mean temperature several degreeshigher. Even in Lapland there are no perennial frozen masses at the bottom ofa a 2