44 Scientific Proceedings, Royal Dublin Society. 
soms of Saxifraga oppositifolia that the purple glow of our 
heath-clad moors was brought to my recollection. 
Musk oxen in considerable numbers frequent its shores; the 
Arctic fox, the wolf, and ermine, with thousands of lemmings live 
and die there. The bones of these mammals, along with those of 
the ringed seal (Phoca hispida), are now being deposited in con- 
siderable quantities in the fluvio-marine beds now forming in the 
bays and at the outlets of all the streams, or rather summer tor- 
rents of Grinnell Land. With these bones will be associated 
those of birds, such as geese and sea-gulls. Numerous mollusca 
and crustacea, many species of rhizopods, with the remains of 
land and sea plants, will there find a resting place. 
Supposing that these beds were examined at some future period 
under conditions, when the glacial epoch had disappeared from the 
surrounding area, it would be difficult to realise that they were 
contemporaneous with the beds formed under the Greenland ice 
cap in the same parallel of latitude and on the opposite shore of a 
channel not twenty miles across. 
In the one case, enormous thicknesses of till with ice- sciatebell 
stones have in all probability been deposited ; in the other, fluvio- 
marine beds containing a comparatively rich assemblage of marine 
and ‘land forms, with river-rolled pebbles, would be brought to 
light. 
In the face of these facts is it incredible to suppose that the 
inter-glacial periods of Great Britain are due not so much to 
“oscillations of temperature” as to alterations in the amount of 
moisture in the atmosphere, and the position of the land-mass re- 
garded as a condenser. 
It is evident that the glaciation of Greenland and the west 
shore of Baffin’s Bay and Ellesmere Land is not a result altogether 
of degrees of heat and cold, or in other words, temperature, but 
equally the result of geographical position which causes theseregions 
to act as mighty condensers, throwing down in the form of snow 
the heated vapour of the south, and so effectually eliminating the 
moisture from the air that a tract of country like Grinnell Land 
lying still further to the north and subjected to an equally rigor- 
yus climate, is comparatively exempt from glaciation. 
