Review of the Glacial Theory. 265 



who live at the bottom. The Fortress of Vardo and the church at 

 Vardo are built in coral sand; it is, therefore, possible that fossil 

 corals may have lived under similar conditions. Numbers of whales 

 come into the fiord; thirty-two were slain by one small steamer in 

 1873 before August 6. Fish of many kinds abound. There is plenty 

 of life in the Arctic basin now to make fossil corals in them. At Ter- 

 edik, about seventy degrees north, I found a luxuriant vegetation ou 

 shore— the wild corn of Iceland, " Baldur's flower," the cotton grass, 

 the "Indian tea" of Labrador, and many bright wild flowers. Ge- 

 raniums and cacti live in pots in the houses ; and canaries live through 

 the winter in warm rooms. The winter's darkness does not kill; 

 therefore, the poles need not be changed theoretically in order to ac- 

 count for Arctic fossils. The hills are clothed with firs and birches 

 where there is soil enough for them to stand in. Peat is common ; so 

 materials for coal grow now, About latitude 69° north, harbors near 

 the mouth of Kola fiord never freeze. They are sheltered from the 

 eastern drift, and remain open all winter. A few miles fuather east, 

 at the Seven Isles, the harbors are blocked every winter. On the 10th 

 of June, 1873, they were still blocked ; on the 15th of August snow 

 patches lay on the beach, but no ice was anywhere near on sea or land ; 

 it had all drifted way." 



The warm equatorial current now aflects the climate in the Polar 

 basni to latitude 80°, in Spitzbergen. The cold Arctic current aifects 

 the coasts of Greenland, Labrador and North America, and carries 

 floating icebergs to latitude 37° north. That which the sea actually does 

 for climate now, the sea may have done when the fossils of the Arctic 

 basin lived, and when land, now dry, was submerged. Professor 

 Dawson, of Montreal, after having studied the glaciers of Mont Blanc, 

 and the iceberg of Bell Isle, and those which enter the Gulf of St. 

 Lawrence, and after having studied the bowlder clay of the post- 

 pliocene of Canada, and the striated surfaces of the rocks beneath it, 

 and above all, the fossils of the bowlder clay, has determined, that the 

 climate was no colder, than that which necessarily resulted from the 

 course of the Arctic current, during the post-pliocene age, when it 

 turned up the Gulf of St. Lawrence, carrying the icebergs with it, and 

 striated the rocks and distributed the bowlder clay, and shells and fish 

 of the Arctic current over the southeastern part of Canada. He says 

 " that the casing of glacier ice imagined by many geologists, as well as 

 the various hypotheses, which have been devised to account for it, and 

 to avoid the mechanical, meterological and astronomical difllculties 

 attending it, are alike gratuitous and chimerical, as not being at all 

 required to account for observed facts, and being contradictory, when 



