The amount of cloudiness is great. The coast of Finmark has over three cloudy days to one clear day ; in the interior of the country clear and cloudy days are about equally divided. Summer fog is frequent on all coasts but fog is rare in winter, though occa sionally experienced in the south east. Sometimes, in severe win ters, a frosty fog ("smoke-frost") appears on the west coast fjords, and is caused by the piercingly cold land wind passing over the relatively warm water.
The "Midnight Sun."—Part, at least, of the sun's disc is above the horizon at the North cape continuously from May 12 to July 29, and at Bodo, in lat.
67° 17' N., from July 3 to July 7. Even at Trondhjem there is practically no night from May 23 to July 20, while the long twi light gives the extreme south of Norway no real darkness from the end of April to the middle of August. In winter, on the other hand, the sun does not rise above the horizon at the North cape for over two months and there is only a twilight at midday. In the extreme south mid-winter night is 174 hours long.
This gives an average population per square mile of but 22.3, hence, Norway, on average, is the most thinly populated political unit in Europe. The most sparsely populated English county, Westmorland, had 834 persons per square mile in 1921. This was exceeded only in the fylker of Vestfold, Akershus and ostfold with 138, 116.5 and 102.4 respectively. The next in order was Rogaland with 48.3. The first three are the smallest Norwegian counties and are in the immediate neighbourhood of Oslo. Roga land is in the extreme south-west of the country. A vast area practically uninhabited, save in the north by nomadic Lapps, reaches from the extreme north as far south as the middle of Hedmark, apart from small local patches of denser population such as those in the outer Lofoten islands and across the Trond hjem depression. The most northerly fylker, Finmark, is the least thickly populated (2.9 per square mile) ; in many highland re gions habitations are hardly less scanty than in the lowland regions of the extreme north. The vast majority of the population dwell by the coast and fjords. In 1930, 1,986,613 were living in rural districts and 798,937 in towns. Of the chief towns of Norway, Oslo, the capital, had a population in 193o of 252,954, Bergen of 97,946, Trondhjem of 54,872, Stavanger of 46,268, Drammen of 25,353. The towns with populations between 20,000 and 15,000 were the ports of Aalesund, Kristiansand, Haugesund and Skien.
The population of Norway in 1801 was less than one million; the increase was very marked from 1815 to 1835, after which rates of increase gradually diminished. The second half of the century, down to 1890, was the period of heaviest emigration, chiefly to the United States of America. Emigration slackened in the last decade of the 19th century, during which period the movement from rural districts to towns, which had decreased from about the middle of the century, revived. The number of Nor wegians abroad is probably about 400,000. In emi grated to U.S.A. and 2,570 to Canada). The Lapps, 19,108 in 193o, called Finns by the Norwegians, were confined especially to Finmark, and are estimated at about 1% of the population. There were also 7,804 Finns, whom the Norwegians
call Kvoener. Of Lapp-Finns there were 3,192. The excess of births over deaths, about 1.8 to 1 in 1926, is much above the European average ; the death-rate is unusually low. The number of marriages is rather low, the average marriage age being high. The percentage of illegitimacy, about 6.7% of total births in 1926, has shown a recent decrease, but is still above that for many European countries. The preponderance of females over males (1,371,919 to in 1930) is partly accounted for by the number of males who emigrate, whilst the higher mortality of males is traced in part to the dangers of a seafaring life.