THE AMERICAN GLACIAL FAUNA UNLIKE THE EUROPEAN. 343 



America, and gradually proceeded southward. All the 

 tertiary rocks form narrow strips of land along the coast. 

 No well-informed geologist can believe that the tertiary 

 strata formed continuous sea-bottoms, — that, for instance, 

 the miocene beds of Spitzbergen were continuous with 

 those of Disco Island in Greenland, or that the Green- 

 land beds are apart of the miocene strata of the Southern 

 States. Equally unfounded on general geological prin- 

 ciples seems the theory of a tertiary Atlantis, advanced 

 some years ago, especially by Heer and others, though 

 first proposed by Forbes, to account for the distribution 

 of life in the Azores and the islands lying off the mouth 

 of the Mediterranean Sea. In fact, the fauna as we go 

 southward from the arctic zone becomes more and more 

 distinct, and it is probable that such distinctions obtained 

 from the earliest palaeozoic times. The Silurian fauna 

 of Europe is nearly as distinct from that of North 

 America as the tertiary fauna of England and France is 

 from that of Virginia, as in the latter case insisted on by 

 Sir Charles Lyell in the Quarterly Journal of the Geo- 

 logical Society for 1845. 



During glacial times, the cave-bear, lion, hyena, an 

 aurochs were associated in Europe with the musk-ox 

 reindeer, and polar bear. It cannot be said that th 

 glacial fauna of America was derived by immigration 

 from Europe, for not a single feature peculiarly Euro- 

 pean in its type is found in our post-tertiary beds. On 

 the other hand, the glacial fauna of northern Europe 

 was essentially Arctic-European or "palsearctic." Be- 

 cause the musk-ox is found fossil in the turbaries of 

 France and gravels of Germany, it need not be inferred 

 that the European fauna of that period borrowed an 



