ARCTIC CLIMATES UNCHANGED FOR AGES. 253 



Had this been otherwise, it is hardly possible to 

 doubt but that the climate there would have partaken 

 more or less in the change yet the oldest relics of 

 its ancient past show conclusively that the same dry 

 sand, the same grains, plants, fruits, flowers, and ani- 

 mals, existed in Egypt then, much as they do now; 

 thus proving by the most irrefragible of all evidence, 

 that the condition of Egypt in those days as to its 

 climate, was not so very different, if it differed at all, 

 from the Egypt of to-day. 



That being so, it follows that arctic ice and snow 

 covered the face of Nature in the neighbourhood of 

 the poles from before the dawn of historic time, much 

 in the same manner as it does at present. Had the 

 polar axis of the earth shifted to any very appre- 

 ciable extent, it must have entailed a general redistri- 

 bution of climate throughout the world. The object 

 of this digression therefore, is to show the enormous 

 period of time during which our little friend, the birch 

 tree of the arctic regions, must have braved the rigour 

 of the elements upon the desolate plains of Spitzbergen. 

 For we must bear in mind, that great as the space of 

 historic time may appear to us to be when compared 

 with our own brief and ephemeral period of existence- 

 even the earliest dawn of human history is as nothing 

 when compared with the immeasurable eternity of the 

 past, so far as it is gauged by the space of geological 

 time. If therefore we were enabled to put a date to 

 the period when Spitzbergen enjoyed a milder climate 

 than it does at present, it might carry us back to an 

 epoch, compared with which 6000 years (the present 

 approximate limit to which human records extend) 

 might seem small in comparison. 



