ADDEESS. 31 



I have elsewhere endeavoured to show, on the evidence found in Canada, 

 that the occurrence of marine shells, land plants, and insects in the glacial 

 deposits of that country indicates not so much the effect of general 

 interglacial periods as the local existence of conditions like those of 

 Grinnel-land and Greenland, in proximity to each other at one and the 

 same period, and depending on the relative levels of land and the distribu- 

 tion of ocean currents and ice-drift.' 



I am old enough to remember the sensation caused by the delightful 

 revelations of Edward Forbes respecting the zones of animal life in the 

 sea, and the vast insight which they gave into the significance of the 

 work on minute organisms previously done by Ehrenberg, Lonsdale, and 

 Williamson, and into the meaning of fossil remains. A little later the 

 soundings for the Atlantic cable revealed the chalky foraminiferal ooze of 

 the abyssal ocean ; still more recently the wealth of facts disclosed by the 

 Challenger voyage, which naturalists have not yet had time to digest, 

 have opened up to us new worlds of deep-sea life. 



The bed of the deep Atlantic is covered for the most part by a mud 

 or ooze largely made up of the debris of foraminifera and other minute 

 organisms mixed with fine clay. In the North Atlantic the Norwegian 

 naturalists call this the Biloculina mud. Further south the Challenger 

 naturalists speak of it as Globigerina ooze. In point of fact it contains 

 different species of foraminiferal shells, Globigerina and Orbulina being 

 in some localities dominant, and in others other species, and these changes 

 are more apparent in the shallower portions of the ocean. 



On the other hand there are means for disseminating coarse material 

 over parts of the ocean-bed. There are in the line of the Arctic current 

 on the American coast great sand-banks, and off the coast of Norway 

 sand constitutes a considerable part of the bottom material. Soundings 

 and dredgings off Great Britain, and also off the American coast, have 

 shown that fragments of stone referable to Arctic lands are abundantly 

 strewn over the bottom along certain lines, and the Antarctic continent, 

 otherwise almost unknown, makes its presence felt to the dredge by the 

 abundant masses of crystalline rock drifted far from it to the north. 

 These are not altogether new discoveries. I had inferred many years ago, 

 from stones taken up by the hooks of fishermen on the banks of New- 

 foundland, that rocky material from the north is dropped on these banks 

 by the heavy ice which drifts over them every spring, that these stones 

 are glaciated, and that after they fall to the bottom sand is drifted over them 

 with sufl&cient velocity to polish the stones and to erode the shelly cover- 

 ings of Arctic animals attached to them.^ If then the Atlantic basin 

 were upheaved into land we should see beds of sand, gravel, and boulders 

 with clay flats and layers of marl and limestone. According to the 



' Notes on Post-Pliocene of Canada, 1872. One well-marked interval only has been 

 established in the glacial deposits of Canada. 

 " Notes on Post-Pliocene of Canada, 1872. 



