MESOZOIC TIME CKETACEOUS. 873 



are intermediate in kinds, some Cycads being present in Greenland as well as 

 Kansas, and evidently indicate an intermediate temperature. The flora of 

 the Laramie, without Cycads, is, according to the same authority, "not a 

 tropical, but a temperate flora." 



The testimony as to temperature from the animal life of the Cretaceous 

 seas bears in the same direction with that from plants. There appear to 

 have been no true coral reefs in the British seas ; but they were present 

 beyond doubt in the Mediterranean basin. The facts lead to the inference 

 that the temperature of the waters about the British Islands was below a 

 mean of 68° during the coldest winter month, but not much below, while 

 a large part of southern Europe was within the Coral-sea limit. Texas 

 was in all probability included by the same temperature boundary, 

 although no true coral reefs and not many species of Corals have yet been 

 reported from the region. 



The distribution of a like fauna, for the most part, in the Lower Green- 

 sand group of Xew Jersey, the Eipley group of the Gulf border, and the 

 Montana division of the Cretaceous of Texas and the Western Continental 

 Interior testifies to a nearly common temperature in the waters through this 

 long geographical range. But it cannot be inferred that in the earlier 

 Colorado epoch, or the later Laramie, the temperature was "alike in the 

 waters on the Atlantic border and in those of Texas or of the Interior Con- 

 tinental sea ; for the influencing conditions were widely different ; and hence, 

 even if there were a full series of fossils, there would be marked differences 

 in the cotemporaneous beds of the Interior and the Atlantic border. The 

 Texas waters were within the subtorrid influences of the Mexican Gulf, with 

 no probable source of cold in Arctic currents. But on the Atlantic border 

 the Labrador current may have much modified the temperature of the 

 waters, even if partly shut off by the closing of the Straits of Belle Isle. 

 The coast had, apparently, no Cape Hatteras, and the waters of the Gulf, 

 therefore, had free sweep from the tropics to Cape Cod; and this would 

 have reduced the effect of any Arctic flow to a minimum. 



gondwXna land. 



The belt of emerged land between India and South Africa, mentioned on 

 page 737, is supposed to have continued to exist through the Jurassic and 

 Cretaceous periods. R. D. Oldham remarks, in his paper of 1894, speaking 

 of the contrasts of the fauna of eastern and western India, that in western 

 India the Jurassic fossils belong to a fauna that is represented in the north 

 of Madagascar, in northern and eastern Africa, and also in Europe, differ- 

 ing so completely from the fauna of eastern India, that ''only a few 

 species of world-wide range are found in both." Further, the remains 

 of plants in the Jurassic Kajmahal series of the east coast of India are 

 mostly identical with, or closely allied to, the species of the Uitenhage 

 series occurring near the coast of South Africa, and now regarded as 



