Unlike the sterile Antarctic, however, it is well known that the flora of Arctic lands is a feature of such importance that it has been the subject of an immense amount of expert investigation carried out by very many eminent botanists from every country. Professor Bruce says it is quite impossible to enter into detail regarding arctic botany, largely on account of its sheer profusion. “No matter how far the explorer goes, no matter how desolate a region he visits, he is sure to come across one or more species of flowering plants.... Every arctic traveller is thoroughly familiar with scurvy grass, the sulphur coloured buttercup, the little bladder campion, several potentillas, the blaeberry, many saxifrages, the rock rose, the cotton grass and the arctic willow.” In Grinnell Land (far north of Baffin Land) the British Arctic Expedition of 1875 met with “luxuriant vegetation.” The presence or absence of the Arctic current along the shores of these countries seems to have much to do with the problems of vegetation. Baffin Land, bathed in its icy waters, is far more barren than Greenland, where it does not touch. Possibly Grinnell Land is immune from its influence. It is, nevertheless, quite possible for a dense plant life to flourish—under certain conditions of climate, altitude and situation—deep within the Arctic Circle, where even the tundra, a wilderness of snow in the winter, becomes an impassable fever-haunted, mosquito ridden, torrid, flower decked swamp in the summer. But there is more than this in the botany of Baffin Land! The natural or geological history of the Arctic regions generally is that of the earth’s crust itself, and from this point of view the study of these northern blossoms is more wonderful than that of its rocks.