und besides is at certain places so thickly
strewed with lemming dung, that it must have a considerable
influence on the condition of the soil.

In the Arctic regions proper one is not tormented by the
mosquito,[75] and viewed as a whole the insect fauna of the entire
Polar area is exceedingly scanty, although richer than was before
supposed. Arachnids, acarids, and podurids occur most plentifully,
Dr. Stuxberg having been able during the Yenisej expedition of 1875
to collect a very large number of them, which were worked out after
his return--the podurids by Dr. T. TULLBERG of Upsala, the arachnids
by Dr. T. KOCH of Nurnberg. These small animals are found in very
numerous individual specimens, among mouldering vegetable remains,
under stones and pieces of wood on the beach, creeping about on
grass, straws, &c.

Of the insects proper there were brought home from Novaya Zemlya,
during the same expedition, nine species of coleoptera, which were
determined by Professor F.W. MAeKLIN, of Helsingfors.[76] Some few
hemiptera and lepidoptera and orthoptera, and a large number of
hymenoptera and diptera from the same expedition have been examined
by Lector A.E. HOLMGREN of Stockholm. Dr. Stuxberg also collected a
large number of land-worms, which have been described by our
countryman Dr. G. EISEN, now settled in California. The occurrence
of this animal group in a region where the ground at the depth of a
few inches is continually frozen, appears to me exceedingly
remarkable--and from a general point of view the occurrence of
insects in a land which is exposed to a winter cold below the
freezing-point of mercury, and where the animal cannot seek
protection from it by creeping down to a stratum of earth which
never freezes, presupposes that either the insect itself, its egg,
larva, or pupa, may be frozen stiff without being killed. Only very
few species of these small animals, however, appear to survive such
a freezing test, and the actual land-evertebrate-fauna of the Polar
countries is therefore exceedingly scanty in comparison with that of
more southerly regions.

[Illustration: WALRUSES. After a drawing by G von Yhlen (1861). ]

It is quite otherwise as regards the sea. Here animal life is
exceedingly abundant as far as man has succeeded in making his way to
the farthest north. At nearly every sweep the dredge brings up from the
sea-bottom masses of decapods, crustacea, mussels, asterids, echini,[77]
&c., in varying f