Brief Outline of Pleistocene of Alaska 31 



age was strictly contemporary with the development of Great 

 Glaciers in Europe and North America." 



" What is true of Siberia is equally true of that outlier of Siberia 

 — Alaska — which resembles it in every way, in the preservation of 

 remains of Pleistocene beasts in a very fresh condition, whose very 

 freshness, as in Siberia, points to their having lived in the very latest 

 geological period, and contemporaneously with the glaciation of the 

 country round Hudson's Bay further east." 



On page 164 : '^ " If we turn to America and examine the 

 problems, either as presented by the so-called bone licks of Ohio, 

 or by the driftless areas, we shall be constrained to the same con- 

 clusion. The bones of the extinct animals in both cases occupy the 

 very latest beds and are found, so far as we can judge, at the precise 

 horizon where elsewhere the drift beds occur." ^° 



On page 167 : '^ " The view here urged in regard to the con- 

 temporaneous existence of the Great Glaciers and a fertile cham- 

 pagne country side by side in the last geological age seems to me 

 to best explain the facts." 



" What I do dispute is the inference that they point to the Tee beds 

 being older than the Mammoth beds. Whatever their age, it seems 

 to be quite certain that they must be the result of infiltration, unless 

 trees can grow on blue ice and Mammoths browse on snow." 



Further, Howorth ^' remarks : 



" To shortly state the general conclusions which I would press : 



" I. During the Pleistocene period the Arctic lands, instead of 

 being overwhelmed by a glacial climate, were under comparatively 

 mild conditions, and were the home of a widely spread and homo- 

 geneous fauna and flora constituting, perhaps, the best defined life- 

 province in the world. 



" II. Since Pleistocene times the climate of these Arctic lands has 

 been growing more and more severe, resulting in the extinction of 

 a portion of their vegetable and animal inhabitants. 



" III. The true and the only Glacial climate which we know to 

 have prevailed in the Arctic lands was not during the so-called 

 Glacial age of geologists, that is during the Pleistocene period, but 

 in that which is now current, and which is the product largely, if not 



'' Op. cit. 



^° See Geikie, The Great Ice Age, p. 464. 

 '' Op. cit. 



"The Recent Geological History of the Arctic Lands, Geol. Mag.. Lond.. 

 1893, p. 500. 



