10 
ORIGIN OF LIFE IN AMERICA 
led him to a comparison of the fossil hare remains from the 
ossiferous fissures of Ightham in England with the recent 
polar or arctic hares as a whole. He has been exceptionally 
fortunate in disposing of large osteological collections, and 
his conclusions are of particular interest and of much value 
in elucidating some important zoogeographioal problems. 
Dwelling upon the close affinity existing between the English 
fossil and the Irish living arctic hare, he regards the latter 
as the direct descendant of the former. I should not have 
mentioned these particulars except that they give rise to far- 
reaching deductions. From the fact of the fossil English and 
recent Irish forms being the least specialized members of the 
whole group of arctic hares, Mr. Hinton concludes that it is 
highly improbable that the group can have had a boreal 
origin.* 
That the Irish arctic hare has always lived in Ireland under 
temperate conditions is an opinion which I expressed long 
ago in my works on the European fauna, and in this view Mr. 
Hinton concurs. But I also believe, as I shall endeavour 
to demonstrate later on, that even southern Greenland and 
all the lands surrounding the north Atlantic had a milder 
climate during the Pleistocene Period. It is principally the 
climate of arctic America and Greenland, I think, that be¬ 
came much more unfavourable within recent geological times, 
while that of the British Isles has undergone comparatively 
little alteration. Meanwhile specialization among the animals 
constituting the Greenland fauna probably proceeded at a 
more rapid rate than in Ireland, where the hare had no need 
to become adapted to different'conditions of food and tempera¬ 
ture. In spite of Mr. Hinton’s-argument, I still believe in the 
arctic origin of the group in Pliocene times, mainly because I 
do not admit that we have any evidence for the assumption 
that Ireland was connected with Great Britain during or 
after the Pleistocene Period. Mr. Hinton thus differs from 
me in regarding Central Asia as the centre of origin of the 
arctic hares in Pleistocene times. 
I mentioned that the banded lemming (Dicrostonyx tor- 
quatus) was found in Greenland. Of" late years it has been 
* Hinton, M. A. C., “ The fossil hare of Ightham,” pp. 263 — 264. 
