52 



Anniversary Meeting. 



[Nov. 30, 



posing, while the ability and adroitness with which they are brought 

 to bear on the subject are almost worthy of the great French genius 

 whose speculations form the starting-point of the theory, which is 

 that life appeared first in the northern circumpolar area of the globe, 

 and that this was the birthplace of the first and of all subsequent 

 Floras. 



I should premise that Count Saporta professedly bases his specula- 

 tions upon the labours of his friend, Professor Heer, whose reasonings 

 and speculations he ever puts forward with generous appreciation, 

 while differing from him wholly on the subject of evolution, of which 

 he is an uncompromising supporter; Professor Heer holding to the 

 doctrine of the sporadic creation of species. 



In his " Epoques de la Nature " Buffxm argues that the cooling of the 

 globe, having been a gradual process, the polar regions must have 

 been the first in which the heat was sufficiently moderate for life to 

 appear upon it ; that other regions being as yet too hot to give 

 origin to organised beings, a long period must have elapsed, during 

 which the northern regions, being no longer incandescent, as they and 

 all others originally were, must have had the same temperature as the 

 tropical regions now possess. 



Starting from this thesis, Count Saporta proceeds to assume that 

 the termination of the Azoic period coincided with a cooling of the 

 water to the point at which the coagulation of albumen does not take 

 place; and that then organic life appeared, not in contact with the 

 atmosphere, but in the water itself. Not only does he regard life 

 as originating, if not at the North Pole, at least near to it, but he 

 holds that for a long period life was active and reproductive only there. 

 In evidence of this he cites various geological facts, as that the older, 

 and at the same time the richest, fosilliferous beds are found in the 

 cool latitudes of the North, namely in lats. 50° to 60°, and beyond 

 them. It is in the North, he says, that Silurian formations occur, and 

 though they extend as far south as lat. 35° N. in Spain and America, 

 the most characteristic beds are found in Bohemia, England, Scandi- 

 navia, and the United States. The Laurentian rocks again, he says, 

 reach their highest development in Canada, and Palaeozoic rocks cover 

 a considerable polar area north of the American great lakes, and 

 appear in the coasts of Baffin's Bay, and in parts of Greenland and 

 Spitzbergen. It is the same with the Upper Devonian and marine 

 carboniferous beds preceding the coal formations ; these extend to 76° 

 N. in the polar islands and in Greenland, and to 79° N. in Spitzbergen, 

 and he adds that M. d'Archiac has long ago remarked that, though so 

 continuous to the northward, the coal-beds become exceptional to the 

 southward of 35° N. Hence Count Saporta concludes that the climatic 

 conditions favourable to the formation of coal were not everywhere 

 prevalent on the globe, for that while the southern limit of this forma- 



