In another climate, in another zone of vegetation, exist similar conditions, stretching across the extreme north of Europe. As there the arid sandy heaths alternate with the wet moors, so here in a more varied manner do the dry, waterless tracts, with the marshy grounds. But we are here in Wahlenberg’s region of lichens and mosses. The arid situations are clothed, in expanses over which the eye can not reach, with dry, lead-gray lichens, among which the reindeer seeks his meagre sustenance, and in the half-fluid grounds, which will not bear the lightest footsteps, a luxuriant vegetation of mosses deceives us, in the distance, with the aspect of a smiling meadow. Here the incautious wanderer sinks into the water, which is rather concealed than displaced by the mosses, while on those lichen heaths, tundras, the Laplanders call them, in summer the glowing soil makes every step a torture. The wood-formations of the South American catingas may be opposed to the northern leafy woods and, in like manner, the plains of the llanos of Venezuela to the Russian steppes. In the former, of which A. von Humboldt has given such a vivid sketch, the sleep of nature commences with summer, in the hot, dry season; the vegetation becomes dried up and falls to dust, leaving the ground bare; animal life, in the quadrupeds, flies from the dead land, while the crocodiles and boas burrow into the mud of the gradually exhausted rivers of the steppes, and with this become fixed, till the first torrent of rain, which conjures up a fresh, youthful vegetation on the barren soil and awakens them to life.