PHYSICAL CONDITIONS— POSTGLACIAL. 523 



ing wide tracts which within historical times have always heen 

 hare and treeless. Extensive areas which are now submerged 

 then existed as dry land, and were probably clothed with as 

 thick a matting of forest as those portions of the ancient land- 

 surface which still remain above the sea -level. The wooded 

 region stretched north up to and even beyond the Arctic Circle, 

 although, as one might have expected, the trees in those high 

 latitudes were generally scrubby and dwarfed. From these facts 

 I think it may be fairly concluded that the winter season of the 

 mild postglacial epoch must have been generally genial, while the 

 temperature of summer, owing to the greater extent of land, may 

 have been somewhat warmer. From the circumstance that a 

 woody vegetation covered such regions as the Faeroe Islands, we 

 may likewise infer an absence of violent winds ; for, as a writer 

 in a recent number of the Quarterly Review has remarked, it is to 

 the long-continued cold winds and gales that the absence or 

 scarcity of trees in the higher latitudes is probably due. The ice- 

 fields of the polar regions were considerably reduced in extent, 

 while continuous or nearly-continuous land, connecting Greenland 

 with Scandinavia, shut off cold arctic currents and allowed the 

 warm waters of the Gulf Stream to lave the shores and influence 

 the climate of the higher latitudes. Under such climatic condi- 

 tions it is not surprising that the mammalian fauna of temperate 

 regions like Britain and Northern Germany should have greatly 

 abounded — and that several of the species should have attained 

 a much greater size than is ever reached by them in our times. 

 But none of the southern forms characteristic of the Pleistocene 

 Period seems to have returned to North- western Europe. Hyaena, 

 serval, elephant, rhinoceros, and hippopotamus had ceased to 

 form a part of the European fauna. Yet the conditions were 

 such as might well have tempted hither the great carnivores. 

 We know, indeed, that the lion infested the mountains of Thes- 

 saly even within historical times, but its remains have never 

 been met with in any of the postglacial deposits of North- 

 western Europe. The general absence of the large carnivores 

 in postglacial times was doubtless due to the disappearance of 



