468 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS [vor. 48 
organic life in Scandinavia was utterly impossible ’’* and that “ prob- 
ably the situation was just as bad during the second glaciation,” 
Loénnberg proceeds as follows: “In addition to this must be men- 
tioned that from the time of the first glaciation and until the ice 
had almost completely melted away in the Ancylus epoch there was 
not only not a land connection between Scotland and Norway but 
the southern part of Scandinavia (including Denmark) was more 
depressed than it is now and thus the North Sea and Skagerak 
formed a barrier against the distribution of terrestrial mammals 
from Scotland to Norway even more effective than it is in the 
present day.” Apart from a most decided reservation against the 
theory of the utter extinction of all higher terrestrial life in the 
entire Scandinavia during the two glaciations, and more especially 
during the second, being called “an established geological fact,” 
since there is a growing opinion among glaciologists that there was 
a considerable area of ice-free land in western and northern Norway 
during the latter, I must insist that the question of a Scoto-Nor- 
wegian land bridge does not involve the rise of land in the southern 
part of the North Sea, Denmark, or southern Scandinavia. The 
land bridge in question connected much farther north, on the west 
coast of Norway certainly not south of 59° north latitude, while 
on the east coast of Scotland only the land north of 56°, including 
Shetland in the north and the Hebrides with northern and western 
Ireland in the west is included. It may be said in general that an 
interpretation of the biotic history of the glacial period in western 
Norway must always be defective if it is taken for granted that 
what happened there during that age was a mere synchronous repe- 
tition of what happened in the Baltic and in southern Sweden. 
The other biotic and geologic considerations involved are treated 
of elsewhere in this paper and need not detain us here, but I wish 
to point out in this connection that my theory of the Scoto-Nor- 
wegian dispersal would not have been invalidated even if Lonn- 
berg had been correct in considering the Scotch and the Norwegian 
deer subspecifically distinct. According to his view the former has 
more characters in common with the Central European deer, the 
*Compare this with Kobelt’s view in Die Mollusken der Palaearktischen 
Region, 1897, pp. 152-158. 
The question whether the megaglacial period in Scandinavia was so ex- 
cessively severe as indicated by Lonnbere I have barely touched upon in 
this essay, as it does not necessarily affect the main proposition I am de- 
fending. Probably everybody is agreed that it was severe enough to preclude 
the possibility of the majority of the biota here considered from having 
survived in Norway since preglacial times. 
—_—— 
