12 ORIGIN OF LIFE IN AMERICA 



sound of inconsiderable width, Bering Strait, divides arctic 

 America from the Asiatic Continent. We can easily imagine 

 what a comparatively small change in the configuration of 

 land and water would thus bring Greenland into direct touch 

 with Asia, by way of arctic America (compare Fig. 1). 



It has actually been suggested by several writers that the 

 faunal relationship which exists between Greenland and 

 Europe is due to former land bridges across Bering Strait 

 and Davis Strait, facilitating the passages of animals from 

 Europe by way of Asia. That such land connections really 

 existed in recent geological times, I do not doubt, and they 

 will be further described in this and one of my next chapters. 

 Still, their existence does not preclude the possibility of 

 Greenland having likewise been connected by land directly 

 with Europe. A close relationship exists between some of the 

 western European and Greenland mammals. In some in- 

 stances that affinity is no longer apparent in the recent 

 mammalian fauna, but can be demonstrated to have once been 

 a prominent feature. The extinct Irish reindeer for example, 

 clearly indicates, in the character of its skull and antlers, 

 that it was closely related to the present Greenland and arctic 

 American races of reindeer, thus suggesting the former 

 existence of some more direct means of transit from Green- 

 land to Ireland, or vice versa, than by the circuitous route 

 across Europe, Asia and arctic America. Many authorities, 

 indeed, have on other grounds insisted upon the former 

 presence of a land bridge uniting Scotland, the Faroes, 

 Iceland and Greenland, with America. 



The story of the extermination of the indigenous reindeer 

 in Iceland in the twelfth century is too vague to be of much 

 use in connection with these researches. It appears certain, 

 at any rate, that no reindeer had inhabited Iceland for some 

 hundreds of years before the end of the eighteenth century, 

 when the ancestors of the present stock were brought over 

 from Finmark. The assumption of the existence of such 

 a land connection as that referred to, in Pliocene, and perhaps 

 early Pleistocene times, or, in other words, just before and 

 during the beginning of the Glacial Epoch, is generally based 

 upon other ground than the distribution of mammals. I have 

 recently collected the various sources of evidence in favour 



