^6 Where did Life Begirt? 



follow that either they or their ancestry aban- 

 doned a tropical climate elsewhere to invade 

 the ice and snow in which they perished ? It 

 is much more probable that an unfavorable 

 climate, increasing in its severity as the glacial 

 period came on, exterminated them where 

 their remains are found. 



Elaborate theories have been contrived to 

 account for their having been carried and de- 

 posited there, and other theories shifting the 

 earth's axis this way and that ; also asserting 

 elevations, subsidences, and ocean currents 

 unlike the present to furnish for them at one 

 time or another a suitable habitat. If in the 

 process of the earth's cooling, the polar lands 

 and seas must have been for aofes as hot as 

 they could be and maintain tropical or any 

 other life, it seems superfluous, to say the least 

 (in our own time and upon the discovery of the 

 remains of such life), to suppose subsidences 

 and elevations to divert and extend immense 

 warm ocean currents solely to provide for 

 that, in later and colder periods, which was 

 quite well enough provided for long before 

 and in the natural order of things. 



