Page Seven 



Tho ohjcH't of the expedition, as described l)y Baron do Geer, is to 

 execute in Southern Canada and Northern United States a comprehen- 

 sive series of measurements in order to test the international utiHty of his 

 theory of determining the chronology of the past 12,000 years by ob- 

 servations of clay laminations. Since 1878, he has worked out and util- 

 ized a method of de'.ermining, by actual counting of certain seasonally 

 distinctly laminated clay-layers, the chronology of the past 12,000 years, 

 or the period that wi*^nessed the evolution of man as well as of the whole 

 fauna and flora of those parts of Northern Europe and North America 

 which during the Ice Age were barren deserts covered by extensive ice- 

 sheens, but have since that time become changed into the very centers of 

 civilization. 



By the new method of investigation it has been shown possible, 

 Baron de Geer believes, to determine, step by step, how the large ice- 

 sheets receded and melted away, this being registered from the melting 

 season of everj^ year by the annual deposition of melting water sediment 

 and especially of seasonally laminated clays. 



The annual lamina from warmer years being thicker and from colder 

 ones thinner, the chronological self-registering is at the same time a 

 thermographical one. In the same way the annual means of the recent 

 temperatures of the air show very similar changes all over the same 

 cHma'ic zones of the earth, and especially over the named large regions 

 which from the same cause were glaciated during the Ice Age. In the 

 same way the ancient normal variation of the annual temperature of the 

 air, as regis' ered by the lamina of the clay, has been found to be astonish- 

 ingly coincident, not only at a great number of places in all parts of 

 Sweden even at distances of more than a thousand kilometres and, where 

 investigations hitherto have been carried out, in the adjoining countries, 

 but, what is still more remarkable, the same identity of variation seems 

 to occur also be' ween several different points in North America and cor- 

 responding parts of the continuous Swedish time-scale, now worked out 

 without interruption for the last 15,000 years. 



Baron de Geer expects to establish through the application of his 

 theory the laws regulating the whole recession of the great ice-sheet, the 

 accurate datirg of the lime-periods, and the amount of time which the 

 plants and animals have had at their disposal for immigration and settle- 

 ment throughout the northern part of America, as well as the time re- 

 quired for the development of the soil and the vegetable mould, for the 



