From the nature of the Arctic forests, the reader will be prepared to learn that they are not inhabited, like those of the Tropics, by swarms of animals; or made musical by the songs of birds, like our European woods. Even the echoes are silent, except when the hoarse wind bears to them the peculiar cry of the reindeer, the howl of the wolf, or the sharp scream of some bird of prey. Insect life, however, is active and abundant; and our Arctic travellers have suffered greatly from the legions of gnats which haunt their swampy recesses. * * * * * Passing from the forest region into the treeless wastes, we may glance once again at their strikingly impressive features. North of the 62nd parallel no corn can ripen, on account of the fatal power of the winds which pour down from the Arctic Ocean. As we advance to the northward, a wide-spread area of desolation stretches before us: salt steppes, stony plains, boundless swamps, and lakes of salt and fresh water. So terrible is the cold that the spongy soil is perpetually frozen to the depth of some hundred feet below the surface; and the surface itself, though not thawed until the end of June, is again ice-bound by the middle of September. One of the most graphic sketches with which we are acquainted of the extreme Siberian desert is furnished by Admiral von Wrangel, who travelled during the winter from the mouth of the Kolyma to Behring Strait. Here, he says, endless snows and ice-crusted rocks bound the horizon; Nature lies shrouded in all but perpetual winter; life is a constant conflict with privation and with the terrors of cold and hunger; the grave of Nature, containing only the bones of another world. The people, and even the snow, throw off a continual vapour; and this evaporation is instantly changed into millions of needles of ice, which make a noise in the air like the sound of torn satin or the rustle of thick silk. The reindeer take to the forest, or crowd together for heat; and the raven alone, the dark bird of winter, still smites the frosty air with heavy laborious wing, leaving behind him a long trail of thin vapour to mark the course of his solitary flight. The trunks of the thickest trees are rent with a loud clang, masses of rock are torn from their sites, the ground in the valleys is split into a myriad fissures, from which the waters that are underneath bubble up, throwing off a cloud of smoke, and immediately congealing into ice. The atmosphere grows dense; the glistening stars are dimmed. The dogs outside the huts of the Siberians burrow in the snow, and their howling, at intervals of six or eight hours, interrupts the general silence of winter.