THE LANDSCAPE 23 



The Landscape. Warm lands with little 

 sunlight, such as Ireland, have green turfed 

 grasses. The polar summer which is one long 

 day covers all pastures with a blaze of flowers. 

 The bushes also yield a bounty of blossom and 

 wild fruit. The mosquito season is the great 

 event of the year. 



So we may see the meadows beside the lower 

 Yukon, green pasture starred with flowers, 

 bushed, wet, mosquito-stricken range for the 

 bearded Celtic pony, utterly unhke the sun- 

 baked golden steppe of the Dun horse. We 

 must cast back to earlier times when Bering 

 Land was clouded, torrid, range for ancestors 

 of our modern horses, the pasture which 

 changed the browm tapir of Brazil into the 

 skewbald tapir of Mala3^a. At that time pre- 

 glacial America had seven species of three- 

 toed horse-ancestors, some of which may have 

 ranged westward across Bering Land into 

 Asia, and there given birth to the stock of the 

 Old World. 



With the onset of the Great Ice Age the 

 growing weight of the American Ice-cap seems 

 to have strained the loose skin of the Earth, 

 w^hich, in the Columbia Basin cracked, pouring 

 forth floods of lava to overwhelm a region nine 

 hundred miles in length, eight hundred wide. 



