In Great Britain, the sparsest population is found in the sterile highland moors of Scotland, where the county of Sutherland has only 11 inhabitants to the square mile, Inverness only 20.[1262] These figures reveal also the remoteness of a far northern location.  In the southern half of the island the sparsest populations are found in the Welsh county of Radnor, with 49 to the square mile, and in English Westmoreland with 85, both of them mountain regions, but reflecting in their larger figures their close proximity to the teeming industrial centers of South Wales and Lancashire respectively.  In France the most thinly settled departements are Basses-Alpes with 43 to the square mile and Hautes-Alpes with 50, which again owe even these figures in part to their situation on the margin of the densely populated valley of the middle Rhone. [See map page 559.] Norway, almost wholly a mountain country, averages only 18 souls to the square mile.  Less than a thousand square miles of its territory are under cultivation, and these are distributed in small deltas at the heads of the fiords, in low strips here and there along its western coasts, or in the openings of its mountain valleys to the southeast.  Here too is massed the larger part of its inhabitants.  A barren granitic soil, unfavorable zonal location, excessive rainfall, paucity of level land, leaving the “upright farm” predominant, and remoteness from any thickly settled areas, together with the resulting enormous emigration, have combined to keep down Norway’s population.

[Sidenote:  Sparsity of population in the Alps.]

If we turn to Switzerland, a country poor in the resources of its land but rich in the resourcefulness of its people, we find a high average density, 218 to the square mile; but this is due to the surprising industrial development of the marginal plains, which show in the Canton of Geneva 1356 to the square mile, and in Canton Zurich 705, while the rugged upland of Graubuenden (Grisons) shows only 38 to the square mile, Uri only 48, and Wallis (Valais) only 59.  How limited is the food supply of the country is evident from the fact that only 2400 square miles, or fifteen per cent. of its area, can be ranked as arable land, fit for garden, orchard or grain field, while a larger proportion, or twenty-eight per cent. is made wholly useless by watercourses, glaciers, rock and detritus.  One half of the entire country lies above the region where agriculture is possible.  In the Cantons of Uri and Valais, more than half the area is absolutely unproductive, scarcely less in the Grisons, and a third even in sunny Ticino.[1263] The three strictly Alpine provinces of Austria, Tyrol, Salzburg and Carinthia, reproduce approximately these geographic conditions.  Nearly half of their area is uninhabited, and only one-seventh consists of arable land.  In consequence they support only 75 inhabitants to the square mile, while just outside the mountains, in the piedmont