OF LABRADOR AND MAINE. 



259 



which are derived from the British seas, and are even found as far south as the Mediterra- 

 nean These serve greatly to swell the lists. In fact the facies of the flora of Labrador is 

 ITlJandb 8 ; no means'purely arctic, as is that of Greenland Explained in tins wa, 

 the flora of Greenland seems to us no more anomalous than its colder climate and remote- 

 ness from sub-arctic lands do, isolated as it ever has been by deep seas and powerful oceanic 

 currents of different temperatures, which, we must believe, served from the ear best times 

 as barriers against the commingling of more temperate forms of life with purely circum- 



^TlieTiTin our view, no reason to believe that the glacial period, as some writers think, 

 has shifted from the eastern to the western hemisphere, or vice vend; ft* the same causes 

 which brought on the cold period were evidently common to the arctic and sub-arctic 

 Lions throughout their whole extent, though governed greatly by the present distribu- 

 tion of the isothermal lines. That the drift deposits were laid down contemporaneously 

 on both sides of the Atlantic, seems proved by such facts as this: that Leda aretiea {L. 

 portlandlca), more than any other shell characteristic of the drift deposits of the northern 

 portions of America and Europe, has become alike extinct both in Scandinavia and its 

 equivalent, Labrador, Canada, and New England. 

 "The break in the glacial beds- which by Sars> (in which he closely follows D Archiac) 

 are divided into an "earlier Quaternary or facial" formation, from which few fossils have 

 been taken, and those purely arctic in character, and the more recent beds, post-glacial 

 resting upon them, containing a great influx of boreal or sub-arctic and some Lusitanico- 

 Medteranean species -does not seem so distinctly marked in northeastern America as m 

 Eu one In southern England the able researches of Mr. Searles V. Wood jun., enable this 

 w -iter io "arrive at the conclusion that the wide spread boulder clay of England is wholly 

 dTst nc from the older, but partially developed drift of the Cromer coast That conclusion 

 Z arrived at by the minute examination of more than 8000 square miles of the eastern 

 ^Zf^lL, and the grounds for it were submitted to geologists » • ™ map 

 of the drift beds over the whole of that area, with copious sections. It was thus that . I ac 

 nu red the opinion which induces me to deny, as I do, < that we have yet any evidence of 

 any general submergence at the incoming of the glacial period, far less of repeated oscilla- 

 te f submergence and emergence.' Now although I have endeavored to show 



hat on the east coast of England four oscillations of climate have occurred since the inci- 

 dence of the glacial period, viz. : first, the extreme cold of the Cromer drift when the coun- 

 try excpt a part of Norfolk was land; second, the ameliorated climate of the sand and 

 travel series which overlies that drift unconforinably, and partially underlies the boulder 

 Z S the return of cold with the extensive submergence which introduced the wide 

 P Tead formation of boulder clay ; and fourth, the return to sand and gravel cond o^ ; 

 w'ith the elevation and denudation of that clay and the introduction rf^P^J 

 series -yet the oscillations of climate during the tertiary period begin as well a, end with 

 these." — The Reader, London, 1865, p. 466. 



Havinff the -rand outlines of this formation thus mapped out for us, it remains lor 



geoS in this country to see how far the parallel can be carried out in America 



T°ere° is as yet everything to be learned of the lowest and oldest boulder clay of the coast 



of Maine • to ascertain how tar it is conformable with the brickyard clays ol the uplands, 



i Om de i Norge forekommende fossile Dyrelevninger fra Quarferperioden, etc.; af M. Sars, Christiania, 1865. 



UEMOIUS HOST. BOC. NAT. HIST. Vol. I. Pt. 2. 6» 



