The commencement of the region of "Barren Landes" is marked by a line drawn from the mouth of the Churchill in Hudson's Bay to Mount St. Elias on the Pacific coast, and passing by the southern shores of the Bear and the Slave Lakes. To the north of this region it loses itself in the eternal ices, with the last shores of the Parry Archipelago; to the east and to the north-east, the conformity of the soil and the identity of the climate include within it the greatest part of Labrador and all Greenland, from which it is only separated accidentally by the breaking up of the ices which constantly solidify Baffin's Bay, and renders so difficult, in those districts, the distinction between land and water. "In these vast countries," say the writers already quoted, "the primitive crust of the globe preserves still the chaotic character which it assumed at the moment that its fluid elements congealed. Except at the bottom of the ravines and hollows, where each winter's thaw has accumulated long tracts of moss and the wrecks of dwarf willows--the embryo vegetation of the Polar clime--the slow action of the ages has nowhere oxidized this rough rude surface to the extent of clothing with a layer of mould its abrupt nakedness. There no transitionary stratum extends between the primeval granite and the erupted rocks. There, prolonged chains of trachyte, and gigantic causeways of basalt, display again their strata as regular, their ridges as keen, their rents as deep, as on the morrow of that day when they emerged from the original chaos. At a great number of points, as at the bottom of Repulse Bay and in the interior of Melville Island, whole skeletons of whales elevated from the depths of ocean, with the submarine layer wherein death had ensepulchred them, have not received in all the ages that have passed by since their exposure to the day any other shroud than the snows of successive winters, which, melting before the suns of successive summers, annually uncovers their whitened bones, irrefragable proofs of a great geological law." In Asia, the isothermal line of 0° descends even towards the 55th parallel of latitude--that is to say, a little lower than in America; but beyond this line we meet again, as I have already said, with towns of some importance, such as Tobolsk, the capital of Siberia, in lat. 58° 11' north; Irkutsk, in lat. 58° 16' north; and Iakutsk, in lat. 62°. All this northern part of Siberia is only distinguished by the greater rigour of its climate, and by a more and more scanty vegetation from the great Steppes, of which it is the continuation. However, the north-eastern extremity, comprising the peninsula of Kamtschatka, bristles with volcanic mountains which still exhibit some craters in activity, notably those of Avatcha and Klioutchevskoï, or Klutschew. The latter belches forth its fires from one of the loftiest summits of the globe.