This species formerly spread over Europe and Asia to a tolerably low latitude.Cæsar particularizes it among the animals of the Hercynian Forest. Even at the present day troops of wild reindeer traverse the wooded summits of the prolongation of the Ural Mountains. They advance between the Don and the Volga to the 46th parallel of latitude; and they extend their wanderings even to the foot of the Caucasus, on the banks of the Kouma. But their true habitat is that belt of ice and snow bounded by the Arctic polar circle, or, more properly, by the isothermal line of 0° centigrade. "Both the wild and the tame reindeer," says Desmoulins, " change their feeding-grounds with the seasons. In winter they descend into the plains and valleys; in summer they take refuge upon the mountains, where the wild herds gain the loftiest terraces, the more easily to escape the attacks of gadflies and other insect enemies. It is very remarkable that each species of animal has, so to speak, his insect parasite. The oestre so terrifies the reindeer that the mere appearance of one in the air will infuriate a herd of a thousand animals. As it is then the moulting season, these insects deposit their eggs in the skin, where the larvæ lodge and multiply _ad infinitum_, incessantly renewing centres of suppuration." [Illustration: THE REINDEER OF LAPLAND.] To the natives of North America, says a zoologist, the reindeer is only known as a beast of chase, but he is a most important one. There is hardly a part of the animal which is not made available to some useful purpose. Clothing made of the skin is, according to Sir J. Richardson, so impervious to the cold, that, with the addition of a blanket of the same material, any one so clothed may bivouac on the snow with safety in the most intense cold of an Arctic winter's night. The venison, when in high condition, has several inches of fat on the haunches, and said to equal that of the fallow-deer in our best English parks: the tongue and some of the tripe are reckoned most delicious morsels. Pemmican is formed by pouring one-third part of melted fat over the pounded meat, and incorporating them well together. The Eskimos and Greenlanders consider the stomach or paunch, with its contents, a great delicacy; and Captain Sir James Ross says that these contents form the only vegetable food which the natives of Boothia ever taste.[193] * * * * * The order of _Rodents_ has no other representatives in the Arctic Deserts than the Arctic Hare and the Alpine Lagomys. The former is a little larger than our European hare. His abundant fur, gray in summer, grows white in winter, and affords him protection, by a merciful provision of nature, against the carnivorous beasts of prey. It becomes impossible to discern him from the snowy mantle which covers all the earth. He is a native of Labrador and Greenland.