CLIMATES OF GEOLOGIC TIME—SCHUCHERT. © 295 
of the Upper Carbonic thrustings began to take place at the close of 
the period and culminated apparently in the earlier half of Permic 
time, when the entire Appalachian system from Newfoundland to 
Alabama, and the Ouachita Mountains, extending through Arkansas 
and Oklahoma, arose as majestic ranges anywhere from 3 to 4 miles 
high. 
These mountain-making movements of long duration at first caused 
the oceans to oscillate frequently back and forth over parts of the 
continents, and great brackish-water marshes were developed, pro- 
ducing the greatest marsh floras and the greatest accumulations of 
good coals that the world has had. The paleobotanists White and 
Knowlton tell us that the climate of Upper Carbonic time was rela- 
tively uniform and mild, even subtropical in places, accompanied by 
high humidity extending to or into the polar circles. Plant asso- 
ciations were then “able to pass from one high latitude to the opposite 
without meeting an efficient climatic obstruction in the equatorial 
region’’ (1910). 
The marine faunas of Upper Carbonic time were fairly uniform in 
development, and many species had a wide distribution, although the 
biotas were still somewhat provincial in character. Limestones or 
calcareous shales predominated. The large Protozoa of the family 
Fusulinide occurred throughout the Northern Hemisphere and less 
widely in South America. They were also very common in Spitz- 
bergen. Staff and Wedekind (1910) state that the Fusulinide occur 
here in a black asphaltic calcareous rock, i. e., a sapropel like those 
now forming-in marine tropical regions, according to Potonié. The 
water, they state, was shallow, highly charged with calcium carbonate 
and of a tropical character, or at the very least not cooler than that 
of the present Mediterranean. The very large insects of the Coal 
Measures tell the same climatic story, for Handlirsch (1908) says that 
the cockroaches of that time were as long as a finger and the libellids 
as long as an arm. They were “brutal robbers’? and scavengers 
living in a tropical and subtropical climate, or at the very least in a 
mild climate devoid of frosts. We therefore conclude that after 
Middle Devonic time the climate of the world was as a rule uniformly 
warm and more or less humid and that it remained so to the close of 
Upper Carbonic time. ; 
During the time of these mild and humid climates vast accumula- 
tions of carbon extracted by the plants out of the atmosphere were 
being stored up in brackish and fresh water swamps, and even greater 
quantities of this element were being locked up in the limestones and 
calcareous shales in the seas and oceans. According to the physico- 
chemist Arrhenius and many geologists and paleontologists, so much 
loss of carbon dioxide and its associated water vapor from the air 
must have thinned the latter greatly and thus largely reduced the 
