THE FLOWERING PLANTS OF NOVAYA ZEMLAA, ETC. 345 



a more extensive flora lived through the Scandinavian ice-age 

 than we now find in Grinnell Land. On the other hand, from 

 the eastern side of the White Sea, as far at least as the bases 

 of the Urals and Paechoi Mountains, between the arctic 

 circle and the seventieth parallel, we see evidences of recent 

 emergence from an ice-laden sea. Whether this marine trans- 

 gression over a considerable part of Arctic Russia was contempo- 

 raneous with, or later than, the period of maximum ice-development 

 in Scandinavia and Lapland, does not affect the conclusion that the 

 emergence of this extensive area has been very recent, and this with 

 severe climatic conditions must have greatly restricted the incoming 

 of a migrating flora. I assume that in Lapland, on the retirement 

 of the ice, many nuclei of vegetation were at hand ; in Arctic Eussia 

 the recent floor of a retiring ocean offered a most inimical soil to an 

 invading flora. 



The evidences''' at our command seem to be convincing that the 

 tundra of Arctic Russia, and the islands of Waigats, Novaya Zemlya, 

 and Lutke Land were in recent times submerged many hundreds of 

 feet below their level of to-day. Great as this submergence was, it 

 does not follow that the higher mountains of Novaya Zemlya or of 

 the North Island were involved, and if we discard the theory of a 

 universal ice-cap, there is no reason to deny the possibility of survival 

 of some ancient arctic flora on those lands. 



That the floras of Kolguev Island, Dolgoi Island, Waigats, 

 Novaya Zemlya, and Lutke Land are in their main features 

 identical with that of the adjacent Russian mainland is undoubted, 

 and that the spread of their vegetation has been chiefly longitudinal 

 from the southward seems to be true. But how are such pecu- 

 liarities in dispersal as the following to be accounted for ? Saxifraga 

 flagellaris, a plant widely distributed over the polar area, and other- 

 wise restricted to the high mountain regions of the Himalaya, 

 Altai, and Caucasus. Still more remarkable is the distribution of 

 the arctic grass Pleuropogon Sabhiii : so far it has not been met with 

 on the mainlands of the Old or New World, and yet it is a widely 

 dispersed plant throughout the polar regions. If the vegetation 

 now existing in the polar area be due solely to immigration from 

 the south since the withdrawal of a glacial epoch, it is certainly 

 strange why P. Sahinii has got back there without leaving a trace 

 of its existence south of the arctic circle. It may not be out of 

 place to draw a comparison between the plants growing in the 

 most northern known parts of the earth and the floras of Spitsbergen 

 and Novaya Zemlya. 



The following thirty- two plants! represent the flora of Grinnell 

 Land and islands to the north of Greenland between 82° and 

 83° 24' N. It is the flora growing nearest the Pole, all other 

 flowering plants having been gathered south of the eighty-second 

 parallel : — 



* Feilden, Geographical Journal, xi. 357. 



t They were gathered by the officers of the British Polar Expedition, 

 1875-76, and the late Lieut, Lockwood, United States Army. 



