STEJNEGER] ANIMALS AND PLANTS OF NORWAY 507 
are authorities who recognize up to six different glacial periods, or 
stages, with corresponding interglacial times, while others refuse 
to recognize more than one glacial period, denying the existence 
of an interglacial epoch, and so forth. Probably most of these 
opposing contentions are more or less reconcilable, if not given too 
wide an application. Even a glacial climate is not uniform over 
such a vast territory as is here involved, nor are the heavings of 
the earth’s crust uniform. The whole question is exceedingly com- 
plicated, as one set of phenomena may cause diametrically opposite 
results in different places, because the combination with other im- 
portant factors is so utterly unlike. 
One is forcibly struck by this when considering the results ob- 
tained by the geologists who have worked out the Baltic situation 
in Sweden and the closely related conditions in Denmark and south- 
eastern Norway. But to conclude that the same series of events 
must have obtained everywhere else is to frame a Procrustes bed 
upon which scientific truth may suffer. Such reflections naturally 
present themselves when comparing these results with others, say 
for instance, with those which the celebrated author of ‘ The Great 
Ice Age,” J. Geikie, has arrived at in Scotland. If we compare his 
views of the sequence of postglacial events in the latter country 
with those of the Scandinavian geologists we are at once facing the 
discrepancy that the latter refer the warmer periods to the times of 
greatest depression, while with him elevation and mild climate, 
submergence and cold conditions are coincident. In the latest we 
have from him on the subject? this is very forcefully maintained. 
It is not difficult to imagine, however, that conditions causing cer- 
tain climatic changes in the Baltic may have had other results in 
Scotland, and it is therefore plain that the events such as rise and 
fall of the land, continental or oceanic climates, etc., in the two 
areas are not necessarily synchronous. If in Scotland we find a 
succession consisting of a rise, a depression and a rise again, and we 
find a similar succession in southern Sweden, there is no a priori 
necessity for considering these movements having occurred simul- 
taneously, they may have taken place alternately, that is, the rise in 
Scotland may have obtained at the time when the land was sinking 
*James Geikie, On the So-called “ Postglacial Formations” of Scotland, in 
Jour. Geol., x1v, November—December, 1906, pp. 668-682; succession on pp. 
675-676. In an article by Lewis, on “The History of the Scottish Peat 
Moors and their Relation to the Glacial Period,’ Scott. Geogr. Mag., xx, 
May, 1906, p. 252, Geikie has also a “Succession of the Later Glacial and 
Interglacial Stages in Scotland.” 
