THE ARCTIC FAUNA. 171 



authorities on the geographical distribution of plants, 

 Professor Engler, maintains that the arguments in 

 favour of this Arctic connection of America with 

 Europe are more weighty than those for a land-bridge 

 between Greenland, Iceland, the Faroes, and Great 

 Britain. Moreover, he is of opinion that a certain 

 number of species of plants belonging to the Alpine 

 flora of Arctic Siberia have travelled from Scandinavia 

 via Greenland and North America to Eastern Asia, 

 and not direct from Scandinavia to Siberia (p. 143). 



That this ancient Arctic land-connection existed 

 almost throughout the Glacial period appears to me 

 probable. It has often been suggested that such a 

 land-barrier was one of the principal causes of the 

 production of the glacial phenomena in Europe, 

 and as such it must have existed intact certainly 

 during the earlier stages of the Glacial period. 

 The barrier must then have gradually subsided in 

 one or two places ; and once a breach was formed, 

 the complete union between the Atlantic and 

 the Arctic Oceans could not have been long 

 delayed. 



The terrestrial fauna and flora, as we have seen, 

 lend strong support to the view of the former 

 connection between Scandinavia and Greenland, but 

 many other facts point in the same direction. It was 

 Edward Forbes who first drew attention to the pres- 

 ence of a number of species of littoral molluscs on 

 the coast of Finmark which also occur on the coast of 

 Greenland, and he expressed the firm conviction that 



