There can be no doubt whatever, as Dr. Macmillan remarks, considering the circumstances in which they were discovered, and the remarkable appearances they presented--there can be no reasonable doubt that both fragments of drift-wood belonged to, or were connected with, the lost ships; and the curious information regarding the course they pursued at a certain time, furnished by witnesses so extraordinary and unlikely as a few tiny dark specks of cryptogamic vegetation on floating drift-wood, was confirmed, in a wonderful manner, by the after-discovery of the first authentic account ever obtained of the sad and pathetic history of Franklin’s expedition. * * * * * The reader will not expect to find the tundras of Northern Asia or the shores of the Polar Sea rich in bud and bloom, yet even these dreary wastes are not absolutely without floral decoration. Selinum and cerathium, as well as the poppy and sorrel, andromeda, and several species of heath, are mentioned by Dr. Kane as blooming in the neighbourhood of Smith Strait. On the south coast of the Polar Sea Dr. Richardson found a considerable variety of vegetation. We noticed, he says, about one hundred and seventy phænogamous or flowering plants; being one-fifth of the number of species which exist fifteen degrees of latitude further to the southward. He adds:--The grasses, bents, and rushes constitute only one-fifth of the number of species on the coast, but the two former tribes actually cover more ground than all the rest of the vegetation. The _cruciferæ_, or cross-like tribe, afford one-seventh of the species, and the compound flowers are nearly as numerous. The _shrubby plants_ that reach the sea-coast are the common juniper, two species of willow, the dwarf-birch, the common alder, the hippophaë, a gooseberry, the red bear berry (_arbutus uva ursi_), the Labrador tea-plant, the Lapland rose, the bog-whortleberry, and the crowberry. The kidney-leaved oxyria grows in great abundance there, and occasionally furnished us with an agreeable addition to our meals, as it resembles the garden-sorrel in flavour, but is more juicy and tender. It is eaten by the natives, and must, as well as many of the cress-like plants, prove an excellent corrective of the gross, oily, rancid, and frequently putrid meat on which they subsist. The small balls of the Alpine bistort, and the long, succulent, and sweet roots of many of the astragaleæ, which grow on the sandy shores, are eatable; but it does not seem that the Eskimos are acquainted with their use. A few clumps of white spruce-fir, with some straggling black spruces and canoe-birches, grow at the distance of twenty or thirty miles from the sea, in sheltered situations on the banks of rivers. * * * * *