Sir H. H. Howorth—On the Arctic Lands. 307 
as they are on the ice plateau of Greenland could have got their 
vegetable and animal life from any occasional waifs and strays. 
I may say that the entire fauna and flora of Greenland points the 
same moral. It cannot have reached it over the sea, and points un- 
mistakably to its being the shrunken and withered relic of a once 
much richer life and of once much more temperate conditions. The 
same argument applies to many of the migrating birds which nest in 
Greenland but come to Britain and further south to winter. We can 
only explain their presence in Greenland by the theory that its 
climate was formerly more temperate instead of more rigorous. 
What evidence there is therefore from Greenland is distinctly 
against its having passed through a similiar phase which in Britain 
and Scandinavia has given rise to the theory of a glacial period. 
Let us now turn to Spitzbergen. 
Spitzbergen bears in its very name the evidence of the sharply 
outlined needle-like contour of some of its mountains. In the 
Journal of William Bernard, the companion of Barentz, who dis- 
covered it, we read: ‘La terre éstoit la plus part rompue, bien 
hault, et non autre que monts et montaignes agues, parquoy l’apel- 
lions Spitzbergen ” (Reclus V. p. 257). 
Heughlin describes its west coast as a congeries of deep fjords, and 
the mountains, to use his own words, as “nicht gesonderte Massen 
mit vielzackigen, spitzigen Gipfeln auftreten’”’ (Petermann’s Mitthei- 
lungen, 1871, p. 177). 
Hlsewhere the same writer compares the rugged and fantastic out- 
line of the island with the crenellated outline of a medizval castle. 
This is assuredly quite inconsistent with Spitzbergen having been 
smothered with ice, as it should have been in the high latitudes where 
it is placed, if the so-called Glacial age had ever existed there. Let 
us continue, however. 
“Though I had an opportunity,” says Nordenskiold, ‘“ of examin- 
ing in several places in Spitzbergen old beds of glaciers surrounded by 
solid rocks, I have only very seldom met with any rocks polished 
and furrowed by glaciers; and those were besides situated on the 
very edge of the sea. Such extensive and highly polished surfaces 
of rock as are everywhere met with in Scandinavia are not to be 
found there.” (Sketch of the Geol. of Spitzbergen, p. 7, note.) 
The presence of polished rocks close to the sea-level in a country 
which is rising from the waters so rapidly as Spitzbergen, really 
points there, as in Greenland, not to old glacier action, but to the 
scoring of recent shore ice, and thus may also be explained the 
polished surface of the low-lying Dun Islands, and which have 
probably risen from the sea quite recently. 
The débris of Pleistocene marine life, such as it is, points the 
same lesson, and Nordenskiold distinctly suggests that in the interior 
of Ice fjord, and at several other places in Spitzbergen, “(one meets 
with indications that the polar tracts were less completely covered with 
ice during the Glacial era than is usually supposed” (Guox. Mac. 1875, 
p- ool). 
Nordenskiold says: Our investigations of Spitzbergen throw no 
light on the transition from the Miocene Period to the Glacial 
