THE MARITIME PROVINCES. 21 



seem not only to be set aside but reversed in argument 

 by a new and growing belief that transmission of species 

 has extensively occurred from America to Europe and 

 Asia. '* America," says Hugh Miller, "though emphati- 

 cally the New World in relation to its discovery by 

 civilized man, is, at least in these regions, an old world 

 in relation to geological type, and it is the son^alled old 

 world that is in reality the new one. Sir Charles Lyell, 

 in the " Antiquity of Man," states that " Professors 

 Unger and Heer have advanced, on botanical grounds 

 the former existence of an Atlantic continent, during 

 some part of the tertiary period, as affording the only 

 plausible explanation that can be imagined of the 

 analogy between the miocene flora of Central Europe and 

 the existing flora of Eastern America. Other naturalists, 

 again, have supposed this to have been effected through 

 an overland communication existing between America 

 and Eastern Asia in the direction of the Aleutian 

 Islands. Sir George Simpson has stated that almost 

 direct proof exists of the American origin of the 

 Tchuktchi of Siberia ; whilst it would appear that 

 primitive customs and traditions in many parts of the 

 globe are being traced to aboriginal man existing in 

 America. 



Professor Lawson, of Dalhousie College, Halifax, N.S., 

 in referring to the recent and well-established discovery 

 of heather (Calluna vulgaris) as indigenous to the 

 Acadian provinces, observes, " The occurrence of this 

 common European plant in such small quantities in 

 isolated localities on the American continent is very in- 

 structive, and obviously points to a period when the heath 

 was a widely-spread social plant in North America, as it is 



