300 ANNUAL OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY. 



Pirn's specimens of wood from Prince Patrick's Island is of the same character 

 as that just mentioned, and its microscopical characters much resemble Pinus 

 strobus, the American pine, according to Prof. Quekett, who refers another 

 specimen brought from Hecla and Griper Bay, to the Larch. 



In like manner Lieut. Pirn detected similar fragments of wood two degrees 

 farther to the north, in Prince Patrick's Land, and also in ravines of the 

 interior of that island, where, as he informed me, a fragment was found like the 

 tree described by M'Clure, sticking out of the soil on the side of a gully. 



According to the testimony of Capt. M'Clure and Lieut. Pirn, all the timber 

 they saw resembled the present drift wood so well known to Arctic explorers, 

 being irregularly distributed, and in a fragmentary condition, as if it had been 

 broken up and floated to its present positions by water. If such were the 

 method by which the timber was distributed, geologists can readily account 

 for its present position in the interior of the Arctic Islands. They infer that at 

 the period of such distribution large portions of these tracts were beneath the 

 waters, and that the trees and cones were drifted from the nearest lands on 

 which they grew. A subsequent elevation, by which these islands assumed 

 their present configuration, would really be in perfect harmony with those 

 great changes of relative level which we know to have occurred in the British 

 Isles, Germany, Sqpndinavia, and Russia, since the great glacial period. The 

 transportation of immense quantities of timber towards the North Pole, and its 

 deposit on submarine rocks, is by no means so remarkable a phenomenon as the 

 wide distribution of erratic blocks during the glacial epoch over Northern Ger- 

 many, Central Russia, and large portions of our island when under water, fol- 

 lowed by the rise of these vast masses into land. If we adopt this explana- 

 tion, and look to the extreme cold of the Arctic region in the comparatively 

 modern period during which this wood has been drifted or preserved, we can 

 have no difficulty in accounting for the different states in which the timber is 

 found. Those portions of it which happened to have been exposed to the alter- 

 nations of frost and. thaw, and the influence of the sun, have necessarily become 

 rotten ; whilst all these fragments which remained inclosed in frozen mud or 

 ice which have never been melted, Avoulcl, when brought to light by the open- 

 ing of ravines or other accidental causes, present just as fresh an appearance 

 as the specimens now exhibited. 



The only circumstance within my knowledge which militates against this 

 view, is one communicated to me by Capt. Sir Edward Belcher, who in lat. 

 75 30', long. 92 15', observed on the east side of Wellington Channel the 

 trunk of a fir tree standing vertically, and which, being cleared of the sur- 

 rounding earth, &c., was found to extend its roots into what he supposed to 

 be the soil. 



If from this observation we should be led to imagine that ah 1 the innumera- 

 ble fragments of timber found in these polar latitudes, belonged to trees that 

 grew upon the spot, and on the ground over which they are now distributed, 

 we should be driven to adopt the anomalous hypothesis, that, notwithstand- 

 ing physical relations of land and water similar to those which now prevail 

 (i. e. of great masses of land high above the sea), trees of large size grew 

 on such terra firma within a few degrees of the North Pole ! a supposition 



