OF ARTS AND SCIENCES. 175 



&c. in the United States ; when the Elephas Americanus 

 ranged north to Canada, and the Siberian Elephas primi- 

 g-enius from Canada to the Arctic Sea, as well as in Europe 

 and Asia from lat. 40° to the shores of the Arctic Ocean, — 

 in the Old World accompanied by a Rhinoceros, which in 

 Siberia ranged as far north as the Elephant. Taking this as 

 proof that the temperate floras on both sides extended fully 

 up to Behring's Straits, — if, indeed, these straits then ex- 

 isted, — Professor Gray was unable to suppose that species 

 of plants did not come or go when the Siberian Elephant 

 did. 



This warm or mild period was followed by the terrace 

 epoch, as Dana terms it, — a time of transition towards the 

 present condition, bringing the northern part of this continent 

 up to its present level and down to its present cool tempera- 

 ture, so giving to the arctic flora its present extent, and again 

 separating the temperate floras of the New and of the Old 

 World to the extent they are now separated. 



Professor Gray observed, that he could not appreciate the 

 objection that the admission of such vicissitudes militated 

 against the idea of a plan in creation, and in " the adaptation 

 of organic types to similar corresponding physical features," 

 unless the objection goes to the extreme of implying that the 

 present state of things so strictly represents the primitive con- 

 dition as to exclude second causes, and to deny that physical 

 influences, known to have been in operation, should have pro- 

 duced their natural effects in former times as well as now. 

 Looking at the long and eventful history of vegetable species. 

 Professor Gray was not inclined to think that the Eriocaulon 

 septangular e of our Atlantic border was separately created 

 also in the Isle of Skye and a few of the neighboring Hebrides, 

 and in a local station on the western coast of Ireland, while 

 it occurs nowhere else in the Old World, and has not a single 

 generic or ordinal representative in Europe, — nor that the Gin- 

 seng was created in three widely-separated parts of the world, 

 viz. in Eastern North America, in Japan and Mantchuria, and 



