Part 2

Our stay on the one point of Wrangel Island that we touched was far too short to admit of making anything like as full a collection of the plants of so interesting a region as was desirable. We found the rock formation where we landed and for some distance along the coast to the eastward and westward to be a close-grained clay slate, cleaving freely into thin flakes, with here and there a few compact metamorphic masses that rise above the general surface. Where it is exposed along the shore bluffs and kept bare of vegetation and soil by the action of the ocean, ice, and heavy snow-drifts the rock presents a surface about as black as coal, without even a moss or lichen to enliven its sombre gloom. But when this dreary barrier is passed the surface features of the country in general are found to be finely molded and collocated, smooth valleys, wide as compared with their depth, trending back from the shore to a range of mountains that appear blue in the distance, and round-topped hills, with their side curves finely drawn, touching and blending in beautiful groups, while scarce a single rock-pile is seen or sheer-walled bluff to break the general smoothness.

The soil has evidently been derived mostly from the underlying slates, though a few fragmentary wasting moraines were observed containing traveled boulders of quartz and granite which doubtless were brought from the mountains of the interior by glaciers that have recently vanished--so recently that the outlines and sculptured hollows and grooves of the mountains have not as yet suffered sufficient post glacial denudation to mar appreciably their glacial characters.

The banks of the river at the mouth of which we landed presented a striking contrast as to vegetation to that of any other stream we had seen in the Arctic regions. The tundra vegetation was not wholly absent, but the mosses and lichens of which it is elsewhere composed are about as feebly developed as possible, and instead of forming a continuous covering they occur in small separate tufts, leaving the ground between them raw and bare as that of a newly-ploughed field. The phanerogamous plants, both on the lowest grounds and the slopes and hilltops as far as seen, were in the same severely repressed condition and as sparsely planted in tufts an inch or two in diameter, with about from one to three feet of naked soil between them. Some portions of the coast, however, farther south presented a greenish hue as seen from the ship at a distance of eight or ten miles, owing no doubt to vegetation growing under less unfavorable conditions.

From an area of about half a square mile the following plants were collected:

Saxifraga flegellaris, Willd. stellaris, L. var. cornosa, Poir. sileneflora, Sternb. hieracifolia, Waldst. & Kit. rivularis, L. var. hyperborea, Hook. bronchialis, L. serpyllifolia, Pursh.

Anemone parviflora, Michx.

Papaver nudicaule, L.

Draba alpina, L.

Cochleria officinalis, L.

Artemisia borealis, Willd.

Nardosmia frigida, Hook.

Saussurea monticola, Richards.

Senecio frigidus, Less.

Potentilla nivea, L. frigida, Vill.?

Armeria macrocarpa, Pursh. vulgaris, Willd.

Stellaria longipes, Goldie, var. Edwardsii T. & G.

Cerastium alpinum, L.

Gymnandra Stelleri, Chain & Schlecht.

Salix polaris, Wahl.

Luzulu hyperborea, R. Br.

Poa arctica, R. Br.

Aira caespitosa, L. var. Arctica.

Alopecurus alpinus, Smith.