The same authors divide the Arctic lands into three regions, of which one--they name it "the Province of the North-West"--belongs rather to those undulating Prairies described in Book III. than to the Polar Deserts. The two others are the "Middle or Wooded Region," and the "Barren Landes." The Wooded Region comprehends the basins of the Upper Mackenzie, the Churchill, the Nelson, and the Severn. Hudson's Bay cuts into it on the east with its deep anfractuosities. The navigation of this Mediterranean of the North, open to the currents and to the drift of the Polar ices, begins only in the month of June, to close in that of September; yet in this interval the obstruction of the ices is so great that it occupies a stout vessel two months to traverse the diameter of the bay. Along the littoral of this sea the soil never thaws below the surface, and it often freezes on the very surface in the middle of summer. Like a fierce and despotic tyrant does Winter reign on these shores for from eight to nine months. From the end of September the earth, the rivers which flow into the bay, their affluents, and the chaplet of lakes which connect them with one another, all disappear under a layer of hoar-frost. "The provinces of New Wales and of Maine do not enjoy for a longer period than three months the temperature of +11° (centigrades), necessary for the development of vegetation. The southern shores of the Great Bear and Slave Lakes possess that temperature for only two months at the most." It is not until the month of May that the thermometer rises ever so little above zero in the Wooded Region, and that a breath of life passes into the plants. Then only the reddish shoots of the willows, the poplar trees, and the birches attire themselves in their long cottony pods; the thickets grow green; the dandelion, the burdock, and the saxifrages flourish at the foot of the rocks; then the sweet-brier, the gooseberry, and the strawberry put forth their fruity burden; and above these dwarf shrubs the pines, the larches, the thuyas display all the luxury of their sombre verdure. But at the same time the melted snows have transformed the soil, recently so hard and polished like marble, into peaty bogs, where myriads of mosquitoes swarm--an intolerable scourge, which the traveller can only escape by surrounding himself with clouds of smoke. [Illustration: THE DESERT OF ICE (ARCTIC POLE).]