I set out very early in the morning on a sea voyage to explore the natural productions of the tract called Skargarden and the islands belonging to it. The water a mile out at sea was scarcely salt, on account of the numerous rivers which here discharge themselves into the bay. No plants worth notice were to be found, though I searched carefully every place likely to afford any. Near the beach, where the tide often rises in winter ten or twelve fathoms, I observed an Alder thicket now white with little patches of _Trientalis_ and _Mesomora_ (_Trientalis europæa_ and _Cornus suecica_), whose snowy blossoms were a great ornament to the shore. Ray therefore justly mentions[48] the latter plant as growing in maritime places in Sweden. Here likewise grew the Male and Female Lychnis (_L. dioica_), for the most part with red flowers, very rarely with white; as well as the _Gramen miliaceum_ (_Milium effusum?_), and a Rush two feet high, with its sharp stem reaching a span above the panicle, which is lateral, and divided into three principal branches. Of this there was also a smaller variety. (This Rush must have been the _Juncus effusus_. See _Fl. Lapp. n. 117_.) [48] See his _Historia Plantarum, v. 1. 655_, which Linnæus here correctly quotes from memory. The people hereabouts talked much of mountains haunted by hobgoblins, particularly the hill called Svenberget, situated between new and old Pithoea; also of seas and fishing-places, where nothing is to be caught, unless by those who come unexpectedly. Their discourse moreover ran on that useful sort of witchcraft by which a thief is put to his wit's end and detected. The origin of these fables may partly be traced in history, and the rest is to be attributed to invention. The fishes of this neighbourhood are the Crusian (_Cyprinus Carassius_), the Miller's Thumb (_Cottus Gobio_), the Bream (_Cyprinus Brama_), the Asp (_Cyprinus Aspius_) called in this part of Lapland _Kuroupek_, the Stäm (_Cyprinus Grislagine_), the Three-spined Stickleback (_Gasterosteus aculeatus_), the Laxäkel, a species of Trout (can this be the small or young Salmon, mentioned in _Fauna Suecica n. 345_?), the Rud (_Cyprinus erythrophthalmus_), and the Holken (what this last is I know not). In the island of Longoen, three miles from Old Pithoea, I was lucky enough to find, growing under a Spruce Fir, the Coral-rooted Orchis (_Ophrys corallorrhiza, Engl. Bot. t. 1547._) in full bloom, which had never fallen in my way before. It is a very rare plant, and grows so sparingly, that, after finding one specimen, there is little hope of soon meeting with another[49].