REMARKS ON THE RE1NDEEE. 145 



I have before alluded (p. 48), was chiefly, if not entirely, attributable the want, 

 namely, of adjacent mountains to which the herds might be driven in summer. 



As regards the ancient climate of the Continent, all classical authority goes, I 

 think, to prove that the variation of temperature was far greater than it now is 

 consequently more congenial with the nature of the Reindeer. This admitted, 

 much of what might otherwise seem improbable is at once removed. Juvenal 

 (Sat. vi.) speaks of the freezing of the Tiber quite as a common occurrence : 



" Hibernum fracta glacie descendet in amnem, 

 Ter matutino Tiberi mergetur, et ipsis 

 Vorticibus timidum caput abluet." 



Horace in his ' Odes ' makes frequent allusion to the severe cold, not excep- 

 tionally, but as an ordinary condition of the winter. Witness the opening of 



Ode ix. lib. 1 : 



" Vides, ut alta stet nive candidum 

 Soracte, nee jam sustineant onus 

 Sylyae laborantes, geluque 

 Flumina constiterint acuto ? " 



Ovid (Tristia, lib. iii. eleg. x.), speaking of his place of exile on the Euxine, 

 says : 



" Vidimus ingeiitem glacie consistere pontem, 



Lubricaque immotas testa premebat aquas. 

 Nee vidisse sat est : durum calcavimus aequor : " 



and throughout the same books he speaks of the climate in terms which in these 

 days would apply only to that of a hyperborean region. Receding from the 

 Augustan era the Roman annals are quoted as recording an intense frost in 



site of " Old Norway House " so named from the Norwegian experts stationed there to conduct the 

 experiment. The date, I think, 1812. 



On my last visit to York Factory in Hudson's Bay, in the summer of 1842, it was mentioned to me that 

 the customary supply of Eeindeer for the use of the Post was then procured with more difficulty than 

 before. The ancient Pass, where the fence for driving the deer during their periodical migrations had long 

 stood, had become gradually less frequented, doubtless through long-continued molestation of the migrating 

 herds, many of which had evidently sought more remote and less disturbed lines of transit. Hearne, in his 

 ' Travels,' gives, I think, a description of the method of driving the deer adopted by the natives a method 

 both simple and efficacious. That the ancient Cave-dwellers practised some such device to the same end, 

 under the inference that primitive races will arrive under similar circumstances at nearly similar con- 

 clusions, I do not question. Some of the tracings on B. Plate II., and especially those in fig. 7, are, I 

 think, corroborative of this assumption. 



