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 appeal’s 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 
