The surface is barren, marshy, and bristled with peaks; besides an area of 600 square leagues is occupied by the Snae Braen, the greatest mass of perpetual snow and glaciers on the continent of Europe. A prominent cluster of mountains follows, from whence a single chain, 25 miles broad, maintains an uninterrupted line to the island of Megaree, where it terminates its visible career in North Cape, a huge barren rock perpetually lashed by the surge of the Polar Ocean, but from the correspondence in geological structure it must be continued under the sea to where it reappears, according to M. Boué, in the schistose rocks of Spitzbergen. Offsets from these mountains cover Finland and the low rocky table-land of Lapland: the valleys and countries along the eastern side of the chain abound in forests and Alpine lakes. The iron-bound coast of Norway is a continued series of rocky islands, capes, promontories, and precipitous cliffs, rent into chasms which penetrate miles into the heart of the mountains. These chasms, or fiords, are either partly or entirely filled by arms of the sea; in the former case, the shores are fertile and inhabited, and the whole country abounds in the most picturesque scenery. Fiords are not peculiar to the coast of Norway; they are even more extensive in Greenland and Iceland, and of a more stern character, overhung by snow-clad rocks and glaciers. As the Scandinavian mountains, those of Feroe, Britain, Ireland, and the north-eastern parts of Iceland, have a similar character, and follow the same general directions, they must have been elevated by forces acting in parallel lines, and therefore may be regarded as belonging to the same system. The Feroe islands, due west from Norway, rise at once in a table-land 2000 feet high, bounded by precipitous cliffs, which dip into the ocean. The rocky islands of Zetland, and those of Orkney, form part of the mountain system of Scotland; the Orkney islands have evidently been separated from the mainland by the Pentland Firth, where the currents run with prodigious violence. The north-western part of Scotland is a table-land from 1000 to 2000 feet high, which ends abruptly in the sea, covered with heath, peat-mosses, and pasture. The general direction of the Scottish mountains, like those of Scandinavia, is from north-east to south-west, divided by a long line of lakes in the same direction, extending from the Moray Firth completely across the island to south of the island of Mull. Lakes of the most picturesque beauty abound among the Scottish mountains. The Grampian hills, with their offsets and some low ranges, fill the greater part of Scotland north of the Clyde and Forth. Ben Nevis, only 4374 feet above the sea, is the highest hill in the British islands.