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together; it rains frequently at Bergen in the midst of winter[1], and the ports of Hamburg, Lubeck, and Amsterdam, are locked up with frost ten times for once that this city is so exposed. In short, this is an accident that doth not happen more than two or three times in an age. The vapours, which rise from the ocean, continually soften the sharpness of the cold; and it is only in the coasts of Iceland, Finmark, and Greenland, that are found those immense and eternal banks of ice, of which voyagers make such a noise, and which, when they are severed, may sometimes float along the coasts of Norway.
The greatest inconvenience to which this vast country is exposed, arises without dispute, from the inequality of the ground, from it’s being almost entirely covered with rocks and stones, and crost every way by high and large mountains, which render a great part of it wild and desert. There grow, notwithstanding, several sorts of grain in many of the provinces, as in the Uplands, the Ryfolke, Jederen[2]; the rest which have not this advantage may easily be supplied from Jutland or the Danish islands, by means of the navigation. Various
- ↑ See Pontoppidan’s natural history of Norway, vol. i.
- ↑ Holberg’s Danm. og. Norg. Beskrivelse. [i. e. Description of Denmark and Norway.] p. 36. & seqq.
