The clergy also complained to me that, after having resided in this wilderness, and fulfilled the duties of their calling with all possible care and diligence, they are never in the way of promotion, like those employed in schools, or any other station, where they are more at hand to solicit preferment. Indeed it seems very just, that, after having served here for twenty years, they should obtain some small preferment in a more cultivated country, where their children might be properly educated, and enjoy the advantages of civilized society. A schoolmaster at this time resident here, who had exerted himself in the most exemplary manner, so as to do as much in two years as his predecessor had done in ten, with respect to teaching Swedish to the children of the Laplanders, a task harder than that of the plough, had no other prospect than still to remain in obscurity, even his great merit not being likely to procure him any further advancement. In the forests of this neighbourhood good pasturage is now and then to be found; but the corn-fields and meadows are poor, especially the former. After the marshes have been mowed one season, or at most two, they produce no more grass. The Bog-moss (_Sphagnum_) overruns them, and renders them barren. Surely this extensive country might be as well cultivated as Helsingland, which is equally mountainous, and in other respects less fit for improvement than this. I have noticed large tracts of loose bog or moss land, which I am persuaded would make excellent meadows, if any drain, though ever so small, were made to carry off the water. This, I was told, had been tried in some instances, but that no grass grew on the land in consequence of it; on the contrary, the whole was dried up and barren. This arises from the turfy roots of the rushy tribe of plants, which, though killed by the draining, still occupy the ground. As to the pine forests, if the superfluous part of them were felled, and birch trees permitted to grow in their stead, a better crop of grass would consequently be produced. When the country is mountainous, this would be attended with less success; but with least of all where the soil is of the barren sandy kind (_Arena Glarea_), of which I have already spoken several times in the course of my tour. On such a soil, after the burning of a pine forest, nothing grows for the ensuing ten or twenty years. But might not even this dreary soil be improved by felling the trees, and leaving them to rot upon the ground, so as to form in process of time a layer of vegetable mould? In Scania, Buck-wheat (_Polygonum Fagopyrum_) is sown on a sandy soil, but here the climate is too severe. Yet perhaps some other plant might be found to cultivate even here. It would be very desirable to discover some means of eradicating the Bog-moss.