Presidential Address. 2*1*1 



plants, and insects in the glacial deposits of that country 

 indicate not so much the effect of several inter-glacial periods, 

 as the local existence of conditions like those of Grinn el- 

 land and Greenland, in proximity to each other at one and 

 the same period, and depending on the relative levels of land 

 and the distribution of ocean currents and ice-drift. 1 



I am old enough to remember the sensation caused by 

 the delightful revelations of Edward Forbes respecting the 

 zones of animal life in the sea, and the vast insight which 

 they gave into the significance of the work on minute organ- 

 isms previously done by Ehrenberg, Lonsdale, and William- 

 son, and into the meaning of fossil remains. A little later, 

 the soundings for the Atlantic cable revealed the chalky 

 foraminiferal ooze of the abyssal ocean ; still more re- 

 cently, the wealth of facts disclosed by the Challenger 

 voyage, which naturalists have not yet had time to digest, 

 have opened up to us new worlds of deep-sea life. 



The bed of the deep Atlantic is covered, for the most part, 

 by a mud or ooze, largely made up of the debris of formini- 

 fera and other minute organisms mixed with fine clay. In 

 the North Atlantic, the Norwegian naturalists call this the 

 Biloculina mud. Further south, the Challenger naturalists 

 speak of it as Globigerina ooze. In point of fact it contains 

 different species of foraminiferal shells, Globigerina and 

 Orbulina being in some localities dominant, and in others, 

 other species, and these changes are more apparent in the 

 shallower portions of the ocean. 



On the other hand, there are means for disseminating 

 coarse material over parts of the ocean-beds. There are, in 

 the line of the Arctic current, on the American coast, great 

 sand-banks, and off the coast of Norway, sand constitutes a 

 considerable part of the bottom material. Soundings and 

 dredgings off Great Britain, and also off the American coast, 

 have shown that fragments of stone referable to Arctic lands 

 are abundantly strewn over the bottom along certain lines, 

 and the Antarctic continent, otherwise almost unknown, 

 makes its presence felt to the dredge by the abundant 



1 Notes on Post-Pliocene of Canada, 1872. One well-marked interval 

 only has been established in the glacial deposits of Canada. 



