348 MAN AS THE COTEMPORARY OF THE MAMMOTH 



glacier-crowned coasts of Scandinavia and Finland, Avliicli together constituted 

 at tliat time a separate continent. But it is not in tbis frozen continent alone 

 tliat the proofs of such a polar sea are to be found. The whole level country 

 of central Europe from Holland to Russia is strewn with erratic blocks, with 

 rolk'd or scoured stones, which have all been derived from Scandinavia and 

 Finland, and whose southern limit is determined by the elevation of the land 

 which passes under the name of the Weser chain, the Hartz and Erz mountains, 

 and the Iviescngcbirge. To the east the limit of these eiTatic blocks winds 

 through the Hussian lowlands to the Ural, and thence around to Finland by so 

 regular a curve as to be almost susceptible of being descril)ed with a pan- of 

 compasses on the maj). Here, then, we have the circle of dispersion of the icy 

 ocean in question, within which the blocks were stranded, and from the circuit 

 of which it is at once to be discerned that the Scandinavian-Finnish region 

 was an island, and that abroad arm of the sea connected the present Arctic ocean 

 and the White sea with the Baltic. 



II. More than 20 years ago, an English geologist. Smith, came to London 

 with a collection of shells, wdiich ho laid before the director of the appropriate 

 department of the British museum, with the request that he would pronounce 

 on their value and import. ^'My dear sir," said the director, after a cursory 

 examination, ''you have been taken in by some whale fisher; these are muscles 

 which have been picked up on the shores of the Arctic ocean, but they are in 

 bad condition, weather-worn, and in part broken to pieces, and are at best only 

 fit to be thrown into the street." "I did not buy the shells," replied Smith: "I 

 collected them myself from a stratum of argillaceous earth on the banks of the 

 Clyde, in Scotland, where they form an ancient sea-beach." Nor was there in 

 this any misrepresentation ; there exists in Scotland a formation which contains 

 a complete arctic faima of the class of shells in question. 



Since that time such researches have been multiplied. In the whole extent 

 of the North American continent as low as New York, in England and Scotland, 

 in Scandinavia and Finland, and far to the east among the wastes of northern 

 Russia, occur everywhere the same formations ; banks of rounded stones, 

 [Scltcucrsfc'me,) with superincumbent clay, marl, and sand, containing the specific 

 mollusks of the high Arctic seas, or such kinds as only attain their full dimen- 

 sions in those waters, but which degenerate more and more in size as they 

 approach a southern latitude; whence it is to be inferred that their true home 

 must be sought in the higher regions of the north. 



Quite recently Sars, of Christiania, has directed his special attention to the 

 shell l)anks, which occur in southern Norway, and has, with his characteristic 

 sagacity and knowledge of the distribution of individual species, combined the 

 results of his observations. From the collections of shells as well as from their 

 geological stratification, he has been enabled to distinguish two different groups 

 of shell deposits, of which one corresponds to the highest advance of the Arctic 

 sea, the other to the later epoch of its retreat. To the former are related the 

 raowi elevated accumulations of shells, which reach a height of more than 400 

 feet above the present level of the sea, and the deposits of loam which lie imme- 

 diately above the gravel and rounded stones, attaining at most a height of 240 

 feet above the sea. These are the lines of strand and the more deep-lying deposits 

 of the glacial sea at the period of its greatest extension. In these deposits of 

 the sea, at its highest elevation, there are found, according to M. Sars, either 

 species which occur only in the north of Norway, and on simihar glacial lines of 

 coast, or else such as, when met with in South Norway, England and Scothind, 

 evidently languish and contrive to subsist only under a diminished form ; while 

 on the north coast and in the Arctic ocean, where the full conditions of their 

 existence are present, they attain the size which they exhibit in the geological 

 strata. Here, then, the high northern fauna flourished in its fullest development, 

 and those species which at present only reach then- full size and complete organ- 



