
22 GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION OF ANIMALS. 

















The sinking of the lands which closed the true Glacial 
epoch, carried the coast line higher than it is now, as is i 
shown by the fossil deposits of the Leda Clays (Champlain q 
epoch), found along the coast and far up the lower vallies — 
from Labrador to New York. It might at first be supposciii ] 
that such a depression would induce a climate even warmer d 
than the present; but a depression of six or seven hundred — 
feet would have made islands of New England and Nova — 
Scotia, and opened a way-for the Labrador current from the 
Gulf of St. Lawrence into the Bay of Fundy and along the — 
coast of Maine, and, at the same time, would have allowed a — 4 
branch of the current to flow up the valley of the St. Law- 
rence River into Lake Champlain, and very likely down the 
valley of the Hudson. Such a surrounding flood of arctic — 
waters would have reduced the summer temperature of e j 
The species left fossil in the Leda beds confirm this, and 
show very accurately the distribution of marine life at the 
time these beds were formed. The species of the earlier 
Labrador beds are more purely arctic than the present fauna 
over the eastern end of Long Island, and across submerg 
Cape Cod, into Massachusetts Bay. Thus, since ull, or nearly 
all ee ee ee ee 
- north to Cape Ann. The southern outliers of the Syrter 

* Packard, loc. cit., p. 234. 
tStimpson, Proceedings Bost. Soc. Nat. Hist., Vol. IV, p. 9, 1851. 

