all colours, with its verandahs and slender pillars and variously wrought balconies, has a very pretty effect among the dark foliage of the pines and birches.

(b) Kristiania

After Elsinore we begin to experience the full horror of the wind-swept waves of the North Sea. At length on entering the great fjord of Kristiania we are in smooth water. This magnificent mountain rift is nearly 100 miles long. It is an ocean avenue fringed with pines and walled with mountains. At every moment new vistas are unfolded—mountain piled on mountain and cleft by falling streams, or circling round a glittering lake set in the dark green forest fringes. No city in the world could surpass Kristiania for grandness of position.

As in Copenhagen all the new portion is of stuccoed brick, the northern granite being too hard to work, but the country villas are still of wood, painted in the gayest colours.

(c) Stockholm

Now we are in sight of royal Stockholm, with its islands and lakes and pine woods. The city of seven hills and seven islands is set between the great Mälar lake and the Baltic, each island a centre of vivid natural life, and each hill crowned with a church or a palace.

Lady WILDE.-Drift Wood of Scandinavia. Bentley.

Lady Wilde describes the more familiar aspects of these cities in a picturesque manner, see ibid. ch. i.-iv. A very graphic description of Stockholm is given by BAYARD TAYLOR, Northern Travel, pp. 170172; and of Kristiania, ibid. pp. 209-210.

The Danish Tourist Society publish a well written and illustrated description of Copenhagen.

IF nature ever made the boundaries of a nation it determined those of Russia-the Arctic Ocean on the north, the Ural Mountains on the east, the Black and Caspian Seas on the south, and the Baltic Sea on the north-west, with Siberia and Trans-Caspia as the natural extension of her empire.

I left London on a trip to Russia, passing through Antwerp, Berlin, and Königsberg to St. Petersburg; thence to Moscow and Nizhni Novgorod. From Moscow I went south-east through Russia, over the Caucasus to Tiflis in Asia; thence to Batum and Sebastopol, on the Black Sea, and from the Crimea north to Moscow. In all this journey of 3500 miles we crossed no range of mountains, we saw no hills more than 500 or 600 feet in height until we reached the Caucasus. It was one broad level plain from Antwerp to Königsberg, 150 miles in width, bounded on the north by the Baltic, on the south. by the Erzgebirge, and the foot-hills of the Karpathian mountains. Entering Russia, the plain widens, extending north-east 1800 miles along the coast of the Arctic Ocean to the Ural Mountains, south to the Black Sea and the foot-hills of the Caucasus, and south-east 3000 miles to the mountains of Afghanistan.

The greatest extent of upland in Russia is near Great Novgorod, south-west of St. Petersburg, where the Valdai hills rise from 800 to 1000 feet. In the plateau of the

Valdai the principal rivers of Russia rise. The Volga and its branches flow east and south to the Caspian Sea; the Dnieper and Don to the Black Sea; others north-west to the Baltic. Russia is so level that its rivers are slow and sluggish, with little water except during the melting of snows. They are connected with each other and with the Gulf of Finland and the Arctic Ocean by canals, so that intercommunication between different parts of the country is easy in the summer.

In the great plain there are five distinct zones-the frozen, the forest, the black, the agricultural, and the barren steppes. The black zone, near the centre, is the most fertile and thickly inhabited. To the north the country grows gradually less fertile, passing through the forest zone to the arctic zone, entirely destitute of vegetation. To the south of the black zone the country likewise grows less and less fertile, passing through the agricultural zone to the dry and sandy steppes, entirely destitute of vegetation. From 200 to 300 miles in width the black zone extends from Austria, a little north by east, across Russia, over the Ural Mountains, far into Siberia. It has a rich, black soil of great depth, unsurpassed in fertility.

In the northern part of the black zone are occasional groves of oak and birch; travelling north these are succeeded by forests of hardwood, with occasional evergreens. Gradually the hardwood disappears; then we enter the forest zone, pines, and evergreens. About onethird of Russia is forest. In this region are immense districts where the only roads are rivers. Then comes a land of rocks, lakes, and swamps, with isolated and snowy masses rising above the forests and peat-beds. This is the arctic zone; there is Finland, a region of lakes, over 1100 in one province. The great forests of pine become small evergreens, reaching a height of 25 feet in one hundred years, gaining their maturity in three hundred years. Gradually they become yet smaller, and are of slower growth. The giant of these forests is the willow, which sometimes

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reaches a height of 6 meters. A little farther north the rainfall exceeds the evaporation and river flow, and forms a woodless plain of small lakes and morasses, called tundra, on which neither man nor beast could set foot if the ground were not frozen to the depth of very many feet; in summer melting a little more than one foot. This is the land of the Samoyads, where agriculture is impossible, and the natives live by hunting and fishing. Still farther north, yet in Russia, is Novaya Zemlya, 75° N. lat., where no animal life exists; but even here, in this kind of ice and snow, several hundred species of lichen have been found.

Farther

Returning to the black zone near the latitude of Moscow, and travelling south, first the hardwood gives. place to rich prairie land; then we reach the agricultural steppe, a treeless land, susceptible of cultivation, though. lacking in the rich deep loam of the black zone. south lie the vast barren steppes, in the west a sandy desert, in the east a vast saline plain, formerly the bed of a great lake, of which the Caspian and Aral Seas formed a small part.

The very diversity of the country and the occupations of the people of Russia tend to unity, for the north needs the grain of the south, and the south requires the wood of the north. Middle Russia, that great centre of manufactures, without the north and south, would lack markets for its manufactures.

G. G. HUBBARD.-National Geographic Magazine, January 1896. By permission of the National Geographic Society (Washington).

Across the Ural Mountains

The Urals are first seen about half-way between Perm and Yekaterinburg, and at Bisersk the outlying ridges may be said to begin. The forest growth in this district is much more open than we had found it in Vyatka, and on approaching the mountains the pine gives way to birch.