6,8 KJELLMAN, THE ALGM OP THE ARCTIC SEA. 



riorthern Atlantic and the northern Pacific may have stayed there from those times 

 when northern Europé was surrounded with a sea filled with ice stretching down to the 

 present northern coast of France. It is not at all improbable that the Flora of this sea 

 may have been similar to that of the present Arctic Sea. When the glacial formation 

 diminished in the south, southern plants immigrated in the sea as well as on the land, 

 dislodging the main mäss of the glacial ones. However, some of these, being able to hold 

 out the struggle against the new-comers, maintained themselves in their oinginal home 

 and have done so ever since. Even though, as I have tried to show above, the present 

 poverty in algas in the eastern part of the Kära Sea and in the Siberian Sea may depend 

 essentially on the unfavourable nature of the bottom and the slight salinity of the water, 

 still it is probable that during the oldest glacial period, when these seas extended 

 farther southwards than now, the configuration of the coast and the condition of the 

 water were more advantageous for alga3 and that the marine vegetation of these parts 

 of the Arctic Sea was not then so poor ^). The occurrence of several species, as De- 

 lesseria Bcerii, Rhodophyllis dichotoma, Petrocelis Middendorffi, Ptilota pectinata a. o., in 

 the Ochotsh Sea, the Murman Sea and the Spitzbergen Sea, and their absence in the 

 intermediate region of the arctic waters, may be explained by the hypothesis that these 

 species formerly grew also in the last-mentioned sea-region, but succumbed afterwards, 

 becaiise the shore was raoved northwards, partly through the formation of deltas, partly 

 through a general rising of the land elevating the sea-bottom, which was formed of 

 sand-banks, and because large rivers began to pour ever increasing masses of fresh 

 water into the sea. If Halosaccion saccatum, reported from the White Sea, is really 

 to be found there, it should probably be numbered among those species which have 

 formerly been more widely spread along the coast of Siberia; for, even though it be 

 not identical with any of the species of the Pacific, H. fucicola, H. hydrophora, or H. 

 jirmum, these are nevertheless its nearest relations. The change suffered by the Flora 

 in the northern Atlantic and the northern part of the Pacific, in proportion as the 

 glacial formation retreated, took place even in the part of the Arctic Sea surrounding 

 the coast of Norway. By the immigration of southern forms, glacial species were su- 

 perseded or deprived of their predominating influence. The elements of the Flora were 

 considerably increased, and its character was no longer marked by glacial forms, but 

 by such as belong to the Atlantic. However it is not only into this part of the Polar 

 Sea, most closely allied hydrographically to the present northern Atlantic, that southern 

 species have probably immigrated in låter times, or are now in course of immigration; 

 but this is the case also with the Arctic Sea proper. Such a transplantation of algae 

 into certain parts of the Arctic Sea is very much favoured by currents flowing in that 

 direction. Thus, for instance, algse may be easily transported into the eastern part of 

 the Greenland Sea to the coast of Spitzbergen by the Gulf Stream, and into the eastern 

 part of the Murman Sea to the west coast of Novaya Zemlya partly by means of this 

 stream, partly along the almost continuous coast from the Norwegian Polar Sea and 

 the western Murman Sea. Between Spitzbergen and Norway at different latitudes I 



') NoiiDENSKiöi.D, Proven, p. 70—71. 



