360 The Former Climate of the Polar Regions. [June, 
these last, one very rarely meets with any large stone bowlders, 
which have fallen from some neighboring cliff and been imbed- 
ded in sand or clay, either directly, and, if so, close to the place 
where originally found, or else after having in the spring been 
moved a greater or less distance by river ice. In glacial forma- 
tions, on the contrary, as one may gather from the study of the 
strata in Scandinavia that belong to the glacial period, erratic 
blocks transported on icebergs to far-distant regions play an im- 
portant part. If a climate similar to that which now prevails in 
the arctic regions has several times during various geological 
eras existed in the neighborhood of the pole, one has reason to 
expect that sandstones inclosing large bowlders should often be 
met with in these tracts. 
But this is by no means the case, though such formations, if 
they exist on a large scale, could hardly escape observation. 
The character of the coasts in the arctic regions is especially 
favorable to geological investigations. While the valleys are for 
the most part filled with ice, the sides of the mountains in sum- 
mer, even in the eightieth degree of latitude, and to a height of 
one thousand or fifteen hundred feet above the level of the sea, 
are almost wholly free from snow. Nor are the rocks covered 
with any amount of vegetation worth mentioning, and, more- 
over, the sides of the mountains on the shore itself frequently 
present perpendicular sections, which everywhere expose their 
bare surfaces to the investigator. The knowledge of a mount- 
ain’s geognostic character, at which one in more southerly coun- 
tries can only arrive after long and laborious researches, removal 
of soil, and the like, is here gained almost at the first glance; and 
as we have never seen in Spitzbergen nor in Greenland, in these 
sections, often many miles in length, and including, one may say; 
all formations from the Silurian to the Tertiary, any bowlders 
even as large as a child’s head, there is not the smallest prob- 
ability that strata of any considerable extent, containing boulders, 
are to be found in the polar tracts previously to the middle of 
the Tertiary period. : 
Since, then, both an examination of the geognostic condition 
and an investigation of the fossil flora and fauna of the polar 
lands show no signs of a Glacial era having existed in those 
parts before the termination of the Miocene period, we are fully 
justified in rejecting, on the evidence of actual observation, the 
hypotheses founded on purely theoretical speculations, whic 
assume the many times repeated alternation of warm and glacial 
climates between the present time and the earliest geological ages. 
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