50 FOREST LIFE IN ACADIE, 



tinder notice of the classic pens of Csesar, Pansanias, and 

 Pliny. And there is a something in common to both of 

 these singular deer which would seem to connect them 

 equally with the period when they and the gigantic 

 contemporary genera now extinct roamed over so large 

 a portion of the earth's surface in the north temperate 

 zone, where the fir-tree — itself geologically typical of a 

 great antiquity — constituted a predominant vegetation. 



The presence of the remains of Cervus Alces in associa- 

 tion with those of the mammoth, the great fossil musk-ox 

 (Ovibos), the fossil reindeer, and two forms of bison in 

 the fossiliferous ice-cliffs of Eschscholtz Bay, as described 

 by Sir John Eichardson, would seem to be an almost 

 decisive proof of its existence at a time when the tempe- 

 rature on the shores of the Polar Sea was sufficiently 

 genial to allow of a vegetation affording browse and 

 cover to the great herds of mammals which have left 

 their bones there, with buried, fossilised trees, attesting 

 the presence of a forest at a latitude now unapproached 

 save by shrubs, such as the dwarf birch, and by that only 

 at a considerable distance to the south. The elk of the 

 present day, as we understand his habits, unlike the 

 musk-ox and reindeer, for which lichens and scanty 

 grasses in the valleys of the barren grounds imder the 

 Polar circle afford a sufficient sustenance, is almost 

 exclusively a wood- eater, and could not have lived at 

 the locality above indicated under the present physical 

 aspects of the coasts of Arctic America, any more than 

 the herds of buffaloes, horses, oxen and sheep, whose 

 remains are mentioned by Admiral Von Wrangell as 

 having been found in the greatest profusion in the 

 interior of the islands of New Siberia, associated with 



