Prof. P. F. Kendall—The Glaciation of Ireland. 55 
Polar exploration, almost every one of which can be answered from 
the same source thus—‘as was pointed out by Brown (Quart. 
Journ. Geol. Soc., vol. xxvi, pp. 638, 688), many parts of the Greenland 
fiords, owing to the disturbed and muddy condition of the water, 
‘are bare of marine life,’ and ‘ unfavourable for sea-animals’”’; but 
Brown is also emphatic in declaring the richness in fossils of some 
of the fiord muds, and he follows the words just quoted by this 
remark: “‘ Accordingly, if the bed of the Arctic Ocean in these 
places were raised and we found the mouth ofa valley with laminated 
beds of clay rich in Arctic shells...” Professor Gregory’s own 
experience in Spitsbergen refutes the suggestion he now puts forward, 
no less than does the testimony of Cole, Lamplugh, and others to 
the abundance of shells in the mud-bank at the snout of the 
Sefstrém glacier. 
The citation of Nansen for the poverty of plant-life in the Arctic 
Sea where ice-covered and the rarity of Foraminifera in the plankton 
loses its significance when confronted with the following excerpts 
from vol. v of the report of his expedition : ‘‘ Globigerina bulloides 
exists in great quantities and varying size in the great depths of the 
Polarseas.” In “‘allthe plankton samples taken later during the ex- 
pedition there is quite an abundant animal life”. Professor Gregory's 
comment that ‘‘ The poverty of plant-life involves the rarity of 
animal life’’ is contradicted by Gran, who says, in the same volume, 
“Tt is difficult to understand how all the crustaceans (Calanus 
finmarchicus, etc.) that swarm in the upper strata can find the means 
of sustaining life.’ Mr. James Murray, of the first Shackleton 
Antarctic expedition, is quoted as saying: “‘ On the shore there is 
no vestige of marine life, animal or vegetable, such as is found in 
the littoral zone of other coasts.’’ Place against this the description 
by Professor David and Mr. Raymond Priestley of raised beaches, 
e.g. “* But perhaps the most interesting feature of this deposit was 
the presence of hundreds of small shells’’, and again,** In the gravels 
and muds [in the Dry Valley of the Ferrar Glacier] up to a height of 
50 feet fragments and whole shells of Pecten colbecki and the same 
Anatina previously mentioned were very common, hundreds of 
fairly perfect shells being collected . . . the beach on which they 
occurred was two or three miles long.”’ 
- In another place Professor Gregory alludes to the work of 
Mr. Joseph Wright, of Belfast, as showing the boulder-clay “ to 
contain widespread indigenous foraminifera”. The word 
“indigenous”, of course, begs the whole question, the fact being 
that along a narrow belt of the east coast of Ireland the boulder- 
clay contains Foraminifera, among which Nonionina depressula 
greatly predominates, but there are also species of exclusively Liassic 
or Cretaceous range. Which are the true indigenes ? 
One may also fairly ask another question. Why has no one, 
neither Professor Gregory in his flying traverses nor the investigators 
resident in Ireland, ever found a shell or even some of Kinahan’s 
