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glacialis, the most exclusively arctic shell of these deposits. In other words, I regard the plants above mentioned as probably belonging to the period of greatest refrigeration of which we have any evidence, of course not including that mythical period of universal incasement in ice, of which, as I have elsewhere endeavoured to show, in so far as Canada is concerned, there is no evidence whatever.*

The facts above stated in reference to Post-pliocene plants concur, with all the other evidence I have been able to obtain, in the conclusion that the refrigeration of Canada in the Post-pliocene period consisted of a diminution of the summer heat, and was of no greater amount than that fairly attributable to the great depression of the land and the different distribution of the ice-bearing arctic current.

In connection with the plants above noticed, it is interesting to observe that at Green's Creek, at Pakenham Mills, at Montreal, and at Clarenceville on Lake Champlain, species of Canadian Pulmonata have been found in deposits of the same age with those containing the plants. The species which have been noticed belong to the genera Lymnea and Planorbis.

The Glacial age was, fortunately, not of very long duration, though its length has been much exaggerated by certain schools of geologists. It passed away, and a returning cosmic spring gladdened the earth, and was ushered in by a time of great rainfall and consequent denudation and deposit, which has been styled the "Pluvial Period." The remains of the Pliocene forests then returned-with somewhat diminished numbers of species

*Notes on Post-Pliocene of Canada, "Canadian Naturalist," 1872.

+ This I have long maintained on grounds connected with Pleistocene fossils, amount of denudation and deposit, &c., and I am glad to see that Prestwich, the best English authority on such subjects, has recently announced similar conclusions, based on independent reasons.

from the south and again occupied the land, though they have not been able, in their decimated condition, to restore the exuberance of the flora of the earlier Tertiary. In point of fact, as we shall see in the next chapter, it is the floras originating within the polar circle and coming down from the north that are rich and copious. Those that, after periods of cold or submergence, return from the south, are comparatively poor. Hence the modern flora is far inferior to that of the Middle Kainozoic. In America, however, and in eastern Asia, for reasons already stated, the return was more abundant than in Europe.

Simultaneously with the return of the old temperate flora, the arctic plants that had overspread the land retreated to mountain-tops, now bared of ice and snow, and back to the polar lands whence they came; and so it happens that, on the White Mountains, the Alps, and the Himalayas, we have insular patches of the same groups of plants that exist around the pole.

These changes need not have required a very long time, for the multiplication and migration of plants are very rapid, especially when aided by the agency of migratory animals. Many parts of the land must, indeed, have been stocked with plants from various sources, and by agencies as that of the sea-which might at first sight seem adverse to their distribution. The British Islands, for example, have no indigenous plants. Their flora consists mainly of Germanic plants, which must have migrated to Britain in that very late period of the Postglacial when the space now occupied by the North Sea was mostly dry land. Other portions of it are Scandinavian plants, perhaps survivors of the Glacial age, or carried by migratory birds; and still another element consists of Spanish plants, brought north by spring migrants, and establishing themselves in warm and sheltered. spots, just as the arctic plants do on the bleak hill-tops.

The Bermudas, altogether recent islands, have one hundred and fifty species of native plants, all of which are West Indian and American, and must have been introduced by the sea-currents or by migratory birds.

And so the earth became fitted for the residence of modern man. Yet it is not so good or Edenic a world as it once was, or as it may yet become, were another revolution to restore a mild climate to the arctic regions, and to send down a new swarm of migratory species to renew the face of the earth and restore it to its pristine fertility of vegetable life.

Thus closes this long history of the succession of plants, reaching from the far back Laurentian to the present day. It has, no doubt, many breaks, and much remains to be discovered. Yet it may lead us to some positive conclusions regarding the laws of the introduction of plants.

One of these, and perhaps the most remarkable of all, is that certain principles were settled very far back, and have remained ever since. We have seen that in the earliest geological periods all that pertains to the structure, powers, and laws of the vegetable cell was already fixed and settled. When we consider how much this implies of mechanical structure and chemical and vital property, the profound significance of this statement becomes apparent. The relations in these respects between the living cell and the soil, the atmosphere and the sunshine, were apparently as perfect in the early Palæozoic as in any subsequent time. The same may be said of the structures of the leaf and of the stem. In such old forms as Nematophyton these were, it is true, peculiar and rudimentary, but in the Devonian and Carboniferous the structure of leaves and stems embodied all the parts and principles that we find at present. In regard to fructification there has been more progress, for, so far as we know, the highest and most complex forms of flowers,

fruits, and seeds belong to the more recent periods, and simpler forms were at least dominant in the older times. Yet even in this respect the great leading laws and structures of bisexual reproduction were perfected in the early Palæozoic, and the improvements introduced in the gymnosperm and the angiosperm of later periods have consisted mainly in additions of accessory parts, and in modifications and refinements suited to the wants of the higher and more complex types.

CHAPTER VIII.

GENERAL LAWS OF ORIGIN AND MIGRATIONS OF PLANTS. -RELATIONS OF RECENT AND FOSSIL FLORAS.

THE origination of the successive floras which have occupied the northern hemisphere in geological time, not, as one might at first sight suppose, in the sunny climes of the south, but under the arctic skies, is a fact long known or suspected. It is proved by the occurrence of fossil plants in Greenland, in Spitzbergen, and in Grinnell Land, under circumstances which show that these were their primal homes. The fact bristles with physical difficulties, yet is fertile of the most interesting theoretical deductions, to reach which we may well be content to wade through some intricate questions. Though not at all a new fact, its full significance seems only recently to have dawned on the minds of geologists, and within the last few years it has produced a number of memoirs and addresses to learned societies, besides many less formal notices.*

The earliest suggestion on the subject known to the writer is that of Prof. Asa Gray, in 1867, with reference to the probable northern source of the related floras of North America and eastern Asia. With the aid of the new facts disclosed by Heer and Lesquereux, Gray re

* Saporta, "Ancienne Végétation Polaire"; Hooker, "Presidential Address to Royal Society," 1878; Thistleton Dyer, "Lecture on Plant Distribution"; Mr. Starkie Gardner, "Letters in Nature,'" 1878, &c. The basis of most of these brochures is to be found in Heer's "Flora Fossilis Arctica."

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