IVORY ISLANDS IN THE ARCTIC OCEAN. Bw 
in Alanekerdluk, near Disco Island, on the coast of Western 
Greenland, in N. Lat. 70° 2’, and have been well described by 
the late Professor Heer.* In Spitzbergen, as late as the 
Miocene Period, there was a vigorous vegetation, of poplars, 
limes, beeches, and alders, and it is with this mid-Tertiary 
vegetation, that Baron Toll would connect the fossil forests in 
Kotelnoi and New Siberia. Captain McClure found many fossil 
trees in Banks’ Land (Lat. 70° 48’), and fossil forests have also 
been discovered in Prince Patrick’s Island, in Lat. 76° 12’ N. 
A most interesting discovery was made by Sir Edward Belcher, 
on the shores of Wellington Channel, in the very heart of the 
Arctic Regions. At this place he found the dead trunk of a 
giant tree, standing upright in the place in which it grew when 
the climate was in former ages more genial, and he thus speaks 
of this tree of past days :—‘“I at once perceived that it (ze., the 
dead trunk) was no spar, and not placed there by human 
agency; it was the trunk and root of a tree which had 
apparently grown there and flourished, but at what date who 
will venture to say? It is indeed one of the questions evolved 
in this change of climate. As the men proceeded with the 
removal of the frozen clay surrounding the roots, which were 
completely cemented as it were into the frozen mass, breaking 
off short, like earthenware, they gradually developed the roots, 
as well as what appeared to be the portions of leaves and other 
parts of the tree, which had become embedded where they 
fell.”’+ 
While the facts are very remarkable which prove the 
existence of the remains of great forests in the New Siberian 
and Liakoff Islands, it is equally wonderful that the bed of the 
sea around the New Siberian Islands, seems to be covered with 
the tusks and teeth of elephants, which are being constantly 
washed up by the waves on the sandbanks round the shores of 
these islands. Nordenskiold says that the making of new 
collections of mammoths’ tusks year by year in Liakoff’s 
Island, depends on their being washed out of the sand- 
banks, so that after an east wind, which has lasted some 
time, they may be collected at low water on the sandbanks, 
then laid dry.t He also tells us, that when the Vega was 
sailing past Liakoff’s Island, the trawl-net brought up from the 
* See Nordenskidld in the Geological Magazine, 1872, pp. 520-522, also 
Sir J. W. Dawson’s Geological History of Plants, pp. 242, 245. 
+ The Last of the Arctic Voyayes, vol. i, p. 380. 
t Voyage of the‘ Vega,” vol. i, p. 412. 
