UNSOLVED PROBLEMS IN ARCTIC 

 ZOOGEOGRAPHY 



Leonhard Stejneger 



Theory of a North Polar Continent As a 

 zoogeographical center 



About sixty years ago, after the discovery of coal in Spitsbergen 

 and of warm-temperate fossil plants in Greenland and coincident 

 with the agitation by Dr. Petermann for his celebrated theory of 

 the existence of a north polar continent, there appeared a paper by 

 Dr. G. Jager, director of the zoological garden at Vienna, on the 

 nort h pole as a zoogeographical center.^ On the map accompanying 

 this paper is outlined Dr. Petermann's polar continent or, as he 

 expressed it, the greatest island on earth, extending from Cape Fare- 

 well, the south end of Greenland, to the neighborhood of Bering 

 Strait, "as great as Europe from Gibraltar to Novaya Zemlya or from 

 North Cape to Mursuk in the interior of Africa. " Dr. Jager, however, 

 did not assume that this land covered the north pole itself; on the 

 contrary, he postulated a sea basin "which must have been surrounded 

 by land like the Mediterranean Sea at the present day, nay, without 

 doubt, even much more narrowly enclosed. However, there must 

 have been somewhere a communication with the ocean," and this 

 outlet, he thinks, was through Bering Strait, which "played the same 

 role for the Arctic Sea as the Strait of Gibraltar now does for the 

 Mediterranean. " He emphasized vigorously his refusal to accept the 

 theory that "the bridge across which the faunas of the Old and New 

 Worlds mixed" was to be found in the Bering Strait region. On the 

 contrary, he says, "in my opinion the Arctic Sea at that time was 

 separated from the Atlantic Ocean by a broad bridge of land on the 

 opposite side, where today an enormous gap yawns between Greenland 

 and Norway. This, bridge extended from Iceland and the Faeroes 

 to the north edge of Spitsbergen, and these islands, as well as Jan 

 Mayen and Bear Island, form the remnants of it." Similarly, Davis 

 Strait, Baffin Bay, and the other narrow waterways between Green- 

 land and the American continent were at that time undoubtedly dry 

 land according to his hypothesis. This ring of land, narrowly surround- 

 ing the north pole, was supposedly blessed by a congenial climate, and 

 the fauna which originated here radiated from this center southward 

 to the adjacent American, Asiatic, and European continents. 



1 Der Nordpol, ein thiergeographisches Centrum, Ergansungsheft No. i6 zu Petermanns Mitt., 

 i86s, pp. 67-70 and map, PL 3. 



