The salmon of Iceland, which formerly remained undisturbed by the phlegmatic inhabitants, are now caught in large numbers for the British market. A small river bearing the significant name of Laxaa, or Salmon River, has been rented for the trifling sum of £100 a year by an English company, which sends every spring its agents to the spot well provided with the best fishing apparatus. The captured fish are immediately boiled, and hermetically packed in tin boxes, so that they can be eaten in London almost as fresh as if they had just been caught. The mineral kingdom contributes but little to the prosperity of Iceland. It affords neither metals, nor precious stones, nor rock-salt, nor coal; for the seams of “surturbrand”, or “lignite”, found here and there, are too unimportant to be worked. The solfataras of Krisuvik and Husavik, though extremely interesting to the geologist, likewise furnish sulphur in too impure a condition or too thinly scattered to afford any prospect of being worked with success, not to mention the vast expense of transport over the almost impassable lava-tracks that separate them from the nearest ports. In 1839–40, when, in consequence of the monopoly granted by the Neapolitan Government to a French company, sulphur had risen to more than three times its usual price, Mr. Knudsen, an enterprising Danish merchant, undertook to work the mines of Krisuvik, but even then it would not answer. In 1859, a London company, founded by Mr. Bushby,--who having explored the sulphur districts, had raised great expectations on what he considered their dormant wealth,--renewed the attempt, but after a year’s trial it was abandoned as perfectly hopeless. The “solfataras of Iceland”, says Professor Sartorius of Waltershausen, “can not compete with those of Sicily, where more sulphur is wantonly wasted and trodden under foot than all Iceland possesses. While the “Namars” of the north, which are far richer than those of Krisuvik, annually furnish scarcely more than ten tons, the sulphur mines of Sicily produce at least 50,000, and, if necessary, could easily export double the quantity.” As coal is too expensive a fuel for any but the rich in the small sea-port towns, and peat, though no doubt abundantly scattered over the island, is dug only in a few places, the majority of the people make use of singular substitutes. The commonest is dried cow’s and sheep’s dung; but many a poor fisherman lacks even this “spicy” material, and is fain to use the bones of animals, the skeletons of fishes or dried sea-birds, which, with a stoical contempt for his olfactory organs, he burns, feathers and all. There is, however, no want of fuel in those privileged spots where drift-wood is found, and here the lava hearth of the islander cheerfully blazes either with the pine conveyed to him by the kindly Polar currents from the Siberian forests, or with some tropical trunk, wafted by the Gulf Stream over the Atlantic to his northern home.