3. A grey Gnat, with striated wings, a blackish body, and black legs surrounded with white rings. (Mentioned, in the Fauna Suecica, as a large variety of Culex pipiens, the Common Gnat.) This cruelly tormented me and my most miserable horse. Its wings are whitish,
appearing striated near the veins by the refraction of the sun's rays. The thorax was hairy, especially underneath. Abdomen oblong, dotted with black at the sides. All the other parts were grey. While the insect feeds, it raises up its hind feet into a horizontal posture. If I stooped ever so little whilst walking in the meadows, my nostrils and eyes were filled with these gnats.
June 22.
I gathered a shrubby Willow, with lanceolate downy leaves like those of Elæagnus. (This was Salix arenaria.) It is rather a large shrub, but rarely rises to the size of a tree. The leaves are furrowed along the course of the veins, and convex between them, slightly downy and of a greyish green on the upper side; clothed with snowy woolliness beneath. The lower scales of the bud nearly smooth above, and very green. Stem smooth, almost flesh-coloured, or pale brown; the young branches
reddish, clothed with white down. (See Engl. Bot. v. 26. t. 1809.)
Near the new town of Pithoea, close to the shore, grew the round-leaved Water Violet (Viola palustris) with perfectly snow-white flowers.
The Dwarf-cypress moss (Lycopodium complanatum) is rather plentiful hereabouts, and is used for dyeing yarn. For this purpose it is boiled with birch leaves, gathered at midsummer. It gives a yellow colour to woollen cloths. On the shore near old Lulea grew Ranunculus minimus parisiensis (R. reptans).
The new town of Lulea is very small, situated on a peninsula, encompassed by a kind of bay. The soil is extremely barren. Indeed the town stands on a little eminence, which is a mere heap of stones, with sea-sand in their interstices. It seems as if the sea had carried away all the earth, and, like a beast of prey, had left nothing but the bones, throwing sand over them to conceal its ravages.
I quitted this new town at one o'clock, there being nothing to be got; and as no horse was to be procured in the whole place, I proceeded by sea to old Lulea, half a mile distant. Here I met with a curious kind of grass, which in Smoland is called Kaffa skiægg, or Old-man's beard: at Pithoea its name is Svinborst, Hog's bristles: and at this place it is known by the denomination of Lapp-här, Lapland hair. (Nardus stricta, Engl. Bot. t. 290.) It was now in blossom. The root seems half bulbous, or as it were an aggregation of numerous bulbs. The leaves are bristly like a beard, and rough to the touch. The spike is unilateral, and scarcely thicker than the stem, composed of equally narrow alternate oblong scales.