Glacial Flora. 189 
America extend. Some of these plants grow on the moraines over the glacial 
ice itself others along the shore line within touch of the glacial ice. The 
nunataks, or tops of hills and mountains projecting above the Greenland ice 
sheet have their summer greenery and flowers').. For example on JENSEN’S 
nunataks, a cluster of rocky peaks rising 100 to 500 feet above the inland 
ice, at a distance of nearly 50 miles back from the sea, KORNERUP, the geo- 
logist and botanist of Lieutenant JEnsEN’s party in 1878 collected 27 species 
of flowering plants. The ice surface there is 4,900 to 5,150 feet, or nearly 
one mile above the sea; and the nunatak summits vary in height from 5,200 
to 5,650 feet. This very high and isolated flora comprised an abundance of 
Lusula hyperborea, Carex nardina, Trisetum subspicatum, Poa trichophylla, 
Oxyria digyna, Cerastium alpinum, Saxifraga oppositifolia, Campanula uni- 
flora, Potentilla nivea, Ranunculus pygmaeus, Siene acaulis, Cassiope hypnoides, 
Armeria sibirica, and Papaver nudicaule. Dr. RINK found in Umanak Fjord 
near latitude 71° 40' north at an elevation of 4,500 feet among numerous 
hillocks of ice and snow the following plants: Papaver nudicaule, Potentilla 
nivea, Saxifraga tricuspidata, S. oppositifolia, S. caespitosa, Arenaria verna, 
Silene acaulis, Draba hirta, Diarrhena americana and Carex nardina. 
We can picture to ourselves the distribution of the glacial plants 
during the great ice age. In eastern North America during the maximum 
glaciation, all of the mountain tops of New England and Canada, New York 
and Pennsylvania were covered with glacial ice down to the great terminal 
moraine in northern New Jersey and Pennsylvania except the summit of 
Mounts Washington, Katahdin and perhaps the highest peaks of the Adiron- 
dacks. These peaks supported an assortment of arctic plants and many of 
these found today as relicts on them, such as, Ledum latifolium (= L. groen- 
landicum), Rhododendron lapponicum, Diapensia lapponica, Salıx uva-ursi, 
Nabalus nanus, Nabalus Boottii, Solidago alpestris (= 5. virga-aurea), Sib- 
baldia procumbens (= Potentilla Sibbaldii), Silene acaulis, Arnıca Chamissonts, 
Cassiope hypnoides, Bryanthus taxıfolius, Loiseleuria procumbens, Oxyria digyna, 
Salixr phylicifolia, Salix herbacea, Phleum alpınum, Lycopodium selago, and 
others. The mountains of the west, the Rocky and Sierra Nevada systems 
rise in many peaks above an elevation of ten thousand feet. During the gla- 
cial period, south of the limit of the great ice sheet, they supported many 
large and important local valley glaciers which descended in many places 
nearly, or quite, to sea-level and the remnants of these vast ice fields are 
witness of the changes that have taken place in the glacial conditions of the 
Sierra from the time of the greatest extension of the snow and ice. A general 
exploration of this instructive region shows that to the north of California, 
through Oregon, and Washington, groups of active glaciers still exist on all 
the high volcanic cones of the Cascade Range, Mount Pitt, the Three Sisters, 
Mounts Jefferson, Hood, St. Helens, Adams, Rainier, Baker and others. But 
ı) WRIGHT and UPHAM: Greenland Icefields and Life in the North Atlantic 1896: 197— 198. 
