On the other hand, the unfortunate coasts of Greenland are bathed in water chilled by months of captivity near the pole, and loaded with ice that cools down all the winds that blow ashore. Greenland itself is covered with an unbroken sheet of ice, hundreds or thousands of feet thick, yet most of it is no farther north than Sweden. The whole northeastern coast of America, down to Labrador, is incrusted with ice; and the region south of the St. Lawrence has a similar climate to Finland; while even farther south, Boston, within the protecting arm of Cape Cod, is in winter a city of frost and snow and fog from November till April, when it really is little farther north than sunny Naples, where one laughs at winter. Similarly, in the Pacific Ocean, the northward movement of the great Japanese current makes the coast of China habitable and pleasant clear to the Sea of Okhotsk, gives the Aleutian archipelago a pretty decent climate, and causes the islands and coasts of Alaska and British Columbia to nourish the most magnificent forests in America, and to have a climate resembling that of Great Britain. Glasgow and Sitka are, in fact, in the same latitude, and under very similar climatic conditions, except that in Scotland there are no such lofty and cold mountains to precipitate constant rains as is the case along the northwestern margin of America. Similar examples and contrasts might be drawn in other parts of the world. The weather in the interior of continents is pretty much alike on similar latitudes the world round, varying with height; but the climate of all sea-coasts is good or bad as a place to live, in accordance with the temperature of the water which the currents bring to that part of the ocean. But the currents of the ocean influence something besides the weather. Upon them depends to a considerable extent whether a certain part of the coast shall have one or another kind of animals dwelling in the salt water. This is not so much true of fishes as it is of the mollusks or “shell-fish,” the worms that live in the mud of the tide-flats, the anemones, sea-urchins, starfish and little clinging people of the wet rocks, and of the jellyfishes, great and small, that swim about in the open sea.