G. R. Wieland — Polar Climate in Time. 423 



But whilst the constant changes in animal and plant forms, due 

 to the operation of such causes as these, are fairly apparent, the 

 subject of the vicissitudes of the southern movement of life 

 "as it takes its way along the great north and south rivers and 

 is split by the great north and south mountains" of America 

 and Eurasia, is a fairly separate topic. What is plain is that 

 there is and has been a constant stress due to northern prepo- 

 tency extending all the way to the pole itself, where, as has 

 been repeatedl}^ stated, climatic variation has always been rela- 

 tively greatest. And this brings us to the consideration of 

 what the mere determination of the nature of the southward 

 organic stress scarcely explains, that is to say to the crux of the 

 entire question, the reason why prepotent races tended so con- 

 stantly to originate at the north. ]^orcan I hope adequately 

 to deal with this feature of the present subject. However, the 

 ordinary physical environment and the far reaching effects of 

 climatic conditions considered of course in their widest sense, 

 and including in a largely unexplained manner electrical con- 

 ditions, are the sole and the only evolutionary factors influenc- 

 ing life as such, within the range of my vision.* 



From such a view-point quite the first of the elements of 

 polar climate that occurs to me is the peculiar distribution of 

 light. Well might J. W. Dawson, who was not an evolution- 

 ist, saj^ in remarking on the varied northern florae and the fact 

 that the flora of Canada, where growth is arrested by cold 

 nearly six months in the year, is in some respects richer than 

 that of temperate Europe, that, — f 



"It is indeed, not impossible that in the plans of the Creator 

 the continuous summer sun of the Arctic regions may have 

 been made the means of the introduction or at least for the 

 rapid growth and multiplication of new- and more varied types 

 of plants. ^'^ The italics are mine. But we have a fund of 

 facts directly bearing on how much of this growth of new 

 species was thus produced, without any extraneous interference 



* I am glad that but recently so powerful a thinker as Ward has not hesi- 

 tated to thus define his view of bathmism — " . . . Motility (or the power of 

 spontaneous molar motion which is the differential attribute of life) in its 

 later stages takes the form of bathmism, and becomes the universal growth 

 force of the organic world. What I wish especially to emphasize here is 

 that motility, with its generalized form, bathmism, is simply a property of 

 protoplasm and of all living organizms, as much so as sweetness is a prop- 

 erty of sugar, bitterness of quinine or isomerism of protein. Zoism is <i 

 synthetic creation of chemisin.'" (Pure Sociology, p. 115.) I take the liberty 

 of underscoring the last sentence. A simple theory of life may best be 

 founded on the idea of an atomic basis of consciousness as a true property 

 of matter differing in degree in the several atoms just as the several chemical 

 elements differ in their magnetic or their radiant powers, or in any of their 

 other fundamental properties, none of which are definable except in terms of 

 themselves. 



f The Geological History of Plants, New York, 1888. 



