Intelligence of Bears. 69 
collection of fossil plants. The evidence from these and others 
points conclusively to a mean temperature for Greenland of 
quite 30deg. Fahrenheit higher than at present in Meiocené, or 
at the earliest late Eocene times, when the lime, maple, plane, 
and even the evergreen magnolia flourished in those higb 
latitudes. Trees and shrubs covered those far northern regions 
with abundant vegetation; the Grinnell Land bed of lignite 
indicates a peat moss, and in thosé now desolate and mostly 
glacier-covered wastes the delicate water-lily put forth its 
beautiful blossoms in spring. How different the picture of 
lands within the Arctic circle then and at present! The period 
of rich vegetation in those regions must have been co-existent 
with, and dependent on, very different seasonal conditions, 
arising from the varying eccentricity of the earth’s orbit and 
the fluctuating position of its axis,as Dr. James Croll has so 
ably shown in his work, “Climate and Time.” A luxuriant 
flora is not conceivably possible with months of unbroken 
darkness, and the alternations of the seasons must then have 
approximated to those prevailing now in the British Isles. 
The Polar bear may be a survival from this Meoicene period 
of temperate climate, when hibernation, if it took place, was of 
short duration, including the term of gestation, but not 
extending to the birth of the young. The advent of a pro- 
gressively colder winter temperature and decreasing supplies of 
food may then have forced the gravid, and in that condition 
less active, female bears to prolong the time of hibernation 
until the cubs, which in former times would have been born 
into a world waking with a genial spring, now enter upon their 
independent existence buried beneath a snow drift, and must 
there wait their release by the warmth of the sun. 
The recorded examples of intelligence on the part of bears 
are not nearly so numerous as those of some other animals, 
but enough are extant to show that their mental powers are 
of a high character. I recollect when a boy seeing a bear go 
through a performance which implied probably as much 
intelligence as that possessed by the average dog at least. The 
