CLIMATIC CONDITIONS OF THE CHAMPLAIN EPOCH. 347 



from New England, the province of Quebec, and Labrador, the extension 

 of a warm temperate flora and fauna could well keep pace with the 

 glacial recession, so that, as on the waning- INIalaspina ice-sheet, a flora 

 like that of the same latitude today, and concomitant temperate mollus- 

 can and insect life, may well have thrived up to the very boundary of 

 the ice, or perhaps in the case of the plants and insects even extending, 

 as in Alaska, upon the drift-covered ice border. 



Darwin noted, in his narrative of the voyage of the Beagle, that glaciers 

 in the fiords of southern Chile reach down to the sea level within nine 

 degrees of latitude from where palms flourish. Professor W. 0. Crosby 

 tells me of his observations of fine orchards of cherries and other fruits 

 cultivated close to the limits of the large local fields of ice and neve in 

 Norway, one of which has an area of about five hundred square miles. 

 In the Alps the glaciers end only a few hundred feet from productive 

 fields and gardens of flowers. Still more like the condition of North 

 America and Europe during the recession of their Pleistocene ice-sheets 

 is the vast fertile plain of India, enjoying a tropical climate, while within 

 a short distance along its northern side, and farther west and east for an 

 extent of 1,500 miles, runs the almost impassable Himalayan range, with 

 valleys bearing glaciers and summits crowned with perpetual snow. 



The proximity of the very cold Himalayas does not bring frosts to the 

 neighboring tropical plain. In like manner the ice-sheet still lingering 

 on northern Ontario, New York, and New England, did not cause a very 

 frigid climate to prevail in the winters, nor nights of frost in the sum- 

 mers, on the windward low region of the Laurentian lakes whence the 

 ice had recently retreated. 



At a somewhat later time than that represented by the Toronto and 

 Scarboro' fossiliferous modified drift, when the ice-sheet had so far receded 

 as to uncover the Ottawa and Saint Lawrence valleys, which then became 

 filled with the far more extensive gulf of Saint Lawrence to lake Cham- 

 plain, almost to the mouth of lake Ontario, and to Allumette island of the 

 Ottawa river, 75 miles above the city of Ottawa, the presence of a flora 

 including forests, and a marine fauna, nearly like those of today in the 

 Saint Lawrence region, is known, as so fully described by Sir William Daw- 

 son in his recent work, " The Canadian Ice Age," and in his many earlier 

 papers, by their remains in the Leda clays and Saxicava sands, deposited 

 during the short interval between the glacial retreat and the reelevation 

 of the land from its Champlain subsidence. 



In a limited sense the Toronto fossils may be called interglacial, as the 

 term is used in the present paper, since they lie between deposits of 

 glacial drift ; but they seem better referred to moderate oscillations of the 

 ice boundary during its general retreat after the lowan stage of the Glacial 



