Climatic Changes in Japan since Pliocene Epoch. 3 



once ice-covered Europe and America again covered with 

 meadows and woods, and quite as inviting as in by-gone ages. 



Hereupon a thinking mind is naturally led to ask whether 

 this state of things was limited to the above two continents, or 

 was more world-wide in nature, in which case the old remains of 

 erratics and moraines and of polished and scratched rocks should 

 also be found in other parts of the world. And so when Japan 

 Avas opened to international traffic and geologists, both foreign 

 and native, began to scour the country, they naturally looked for 

 ■evidences of glaciers. But strange to say, they were nowdiere to 

 be found. They were not found in Honshu, nor in the Hokkai- 

 do, nor even in the cold island of Sakhalin where even in the 

 southernmost part the mean January temperature falls far below 

 the freezing point, to — ^13°C, a temperature w^hich w^e find in 

 Labrador and Southern Greenland. From this negative evidence 

 they were obliged to infer that glaciers had never existed in Japan, 

 probably because the climate had never been cold enough to 

 generate them. But why had it not been cold? There was no 

 one who could answer this question. 



Since about a year ago, I have been studying our Pliocene 

 fossils found at a place called Koshiba, some eleven kilometres 

 south of Yokohama and beautifully situated on the shore of the 

 Tokyo Bay. Tlie rock in which the fossils are entombed is a 

 coarse tufaceous sandstone, sometimes so coarse as to look like a 

 conglomerate, thus betraying the shallowness of the sea in which 

 it was deposited. The fossils are chiefly Molluscs and Molluscoids 

 with some Ecliinodcrms^ Tiibicolous Annelids, Balanids, Fish-teeth, etc. 

 The Molluscs seem to be very rich in species, while the case seems 

 to be quite the contrary with the Molluscoids, though they are rich 

 in individuals. The number of the species of these two groups of 

 animals which I have been able to distinguish up to this time, 

 amounts to seventy-one,^-' of which the following thirty-nine are 

 living ones: — 



1. Cylichna cylindracea Pennant. 



1) Detailed descriptions of these fossils will appear in a future numbar of this journal. 



