26 



TROPICAL EDUCATION. 



in Greenland tliat late in Seconrlary times ferns, 

 magnolias, myrtles, and sago-palms — an Indian or 

 Mexican flora — flourished exceedingly in what is now 

 the dreariest and most ice-clad region of the northern 

 hemisphere. Later still, in the I'oceno days, though 

 the plants of Greenland had grown slightly more 

 temperate in type, we still find among the fossils, not 

 only oaks, planes, vines, and walnuts, but also welling- 

 tonias like the big trees of California, Spanish chestnuts, 

 quaint southern salisburias, broad-leaved liquidambars, 

 and American sassafras. Nay, even in glacier-clad 

 Spitzbergen itself, where the character of the flora already 

 begins to show signs of incipient chilling, we nevertheless 

 see among the Eocene types such plants as the swamp- 

 cyprus of the Caroliuas and the wellingtonias of the Far 

 West, together with a rich forest vegetation of poplars, 

 birches, oaks, planes, hazels, walnuts, water-lilies, and 

 irises. As a whole, this vegetation still bespeaks a 

 climate considerably more genial, mild, and equable than 

 that of modern England. 



It was in this basking world of the chalk and the Eocene 

 tliat the great mammalian fauna first took its rise ; it was 

 in this easy world of fruits and sunshine that the primitive 

 ancestors of man first began to work upwards toward tlie 

 distinctively human level of the palaeolithic period. 



But then, in the mid-career of that third day of the 

 geological drama, came a frost — a nipping-frost ; and 

 slowly but surely the whole arctic and antarctic worlds 

 were chilled and cramped, degree after degree, by thegrad- I 

 ual on-coming of the Great Ice Age. I am not going to deal I 

 here with either the causes or the extent of that colossal I 



