438 THE PERMIAN PERIOD 



p. 449) is the most characteristic. In northern lands the plants 

 of this flora do not become important, and some do not even 

 make their first appearance, till Triassic or even Jurassic times. 

 The Glossopteris Flora has an enormously wide distribution ; it is 

 found in Tonquin, India, Afghanistan, southern Africa, Australia, 

 and South America, and has recently been discovered in Italy. 



The marine fauna of the Southern Hemisphere is not notably 

 different from that of the Northern. The land fauna of Am- 

 phibia and Theromorphous Reptiles is very nearly the same in 

 India, Africa, and South America ; and there is a marked affinity 

 with the*Permian Vertebrates of Russia and Texas. These ani- 

 mals have not yet been discovered in Australia. 



The facts regarding the Permian of the Southern Hemisphere 

 are very puzzling, and have been much debated. The boulder 

 beds and the striated, polished pavements upon which they rest 

 are just such evidence as has been relied upon to prove the 

 reality of the Glacial Age, one of the latest episodes in the history 

 of the earth. Hence many geologists have concluded that there 

 was a glacial age in the Permian of the southern continents. To 

 such an inference, however, there is one serious objection : 

 namely, the flora and fauna which then flourished on those lands 

 and in the adjoining seas. In the undoubted Glacial Age of the 

 Pleistocene, not only do the scorings and polishings, the moraines 

 and erratic blocks, require the presence of vast glaciers for their 

 explanation, but the fossils are also in harmony with this conclu- 

 sion, and themselves offer excellent evidence of a cold climate. 

 In the southern Permian, on the contrary, we find interstratified 

 with the boulders beds containing every evidence of a luxuriant 

 land and marine flora and fauna, such as could not possibly have 

 existed on or around a continent buried under great ice-sheets, as 

 is Greenland to-day. That the boulder beds and their polished 

 pavements are the work of ice, there can be little doubt, but it 

 seems much more likely that the glaciers were ice-streams, descend- 

 ing from highlands, than that Permian Australia, for instance, was 

 buried under eleven successive ice-sheets. Probably, also, the 

 winters were sufficiently cold to allow the formation of floating ice. 



