204 THE FOREST LANDS OF NORTHERN RUSSIA. 
begird Baffin’s Bay, and one portion at least of Greenland 
and of Spitzbergen. The Upper Devonian, the different 
stages of the carboniferous system, especially the mountain 
limestone, which represent the marine deposits immedi- 
ately anterior to the era of the coal, are equally exten- 
sively spread over the regions bordering on the Pole. The 
Parry Archipelago, beyond the 76th degree of North lati- 
tude, Bathurst Island, Spitzbergen, towards the 79th 
degree of North latitude, and Bear Island, situated 
between Spitzbergen and the North Cape, under 70° 30’ 
North latitude, supply repeated proofs of this, based on 
the observation of the characteristic features of each of 
these stages, in which nothing distinguishes either the 
minerological aspect or the fossils from what they are in 
Europe and in America thirty degrees further to the south. 
For a long time the professor of palaeontology has 
remarked that while the deposits of coal become excep- 
tional in the direction of the south beyond the 35th 
degree, they show themselves continuously in the north 
under the highest latitudes. It must follow that the 
climatic conditions, or simply the geographical ones, 
belonging to the production of coal, which most observers 
agree in considering as having been formed in vast peat 
bogs, have not, during the carboniferous period, manifested 
themselves everywhere, but only in a zone, the southern 
limits of which can be traced approximately, whilst towards 
the north it must stretch itself very far, and extend pro- 
bably even to the Pole.’ 
In the coal formations we have reached the remains of 
a period subsequent to the deposit of the great bulk of 
the mountain limestone. Dr. Heer thus, in Flora Fossile 
Artica (par. ii.), describes the vegetation of that age :— 
‘Towards the end of the Devonian period the dryland 
notably increased in the northern hemisphere; it was 
there an epoch of elevation from the depth of the sea. 
After this extension of continental land having proceeded 
on a vast scale, there began a new period, that of the 
