398 APPENDIX. No. IV. 



direction of the currents was from the south ; a fact 

 which falls in with the drift theory, so far as it goes. 



We cannot, however, dissociate these trees from the 

 facts connected with the distribution of the remains of 

 the Siberian Mammoth in Asia and America. It is 

 now known that this elephant was provided with a 

 warm fur, and that his food was of a kind which grows 

 even now in Northern Siberia ; so that the drift theory, 

 which was formerly supposed necessary to account for 

 the occurrence of these remains, has noW been quietly 

 dropped, sub silentio, by the geologists. Many other 

 drift theories have, in like manner, lived their short day, 

 and gone the way of all false hypotheses ; among others, 

 the drift theory of the origin of coal. Further inves- 

 tigation may show that the glacial epoch of Europe was 

 one of a very different character in Asia and America, 

 and that, while glaciers clothed the sides of Snowdon and 

 Lugnaquillia, pine forests floui'ished in the Parry Is- 

 lands, and the Siberian elephants wandered on the 

 shores of a sea washed by the waves of an ocean that 

 carried no drifting ice. 



There is abimdant evidence, however, that the Arctic 

 Archipelago was submerged in very recent geological 

 periods ; for we know that subfossd. shells, of species 

 that now inhabit the waters of the neighbouring seas, 

 are found at considerable heights throughout the whole 

 group of islands. M'Clure found shells of the Cyprina 

 Islandiea at the summit of the Coxcomb range, in 

 Baring Island, at an elevation of 500 feet above the 

 sea-level ; Captain Parry, also, has recorded the occur- 

 rence of Venus (probably Cyprina Islandiea) on Byam 

 Martin's Island ; and in the recent voyage of the ' Fox,' 

 Dr. Walker, the sm-geon of the expedition, found the 

 following subfossil shells at Port Kenedy, at elevations 

 of from 100 to 500 feet :— 



