A siirvey of the Phytogeography of the Arctic American Archipelago 157 
found 011 rocks of the Mesozoic era, and that of iiortheastern P:ilesmereland again 
rests on the Cape Rawson beds, most probably also of Mesozoic, perhaps of De- 
The general subinergetice of the coasts ttmt followed upon the elevation in 
preglacial and early glacial time seems to have been most considerable witbin the 
Southern parts of the glaciated area, and to have taken place there earlier than to the 
north; J. W. DawsoxN, Canad. Iceage, even makes it contemporaneous with the 
maximum of the iceage, as he does not admit any general glaciation, only local 
glaciers and icesheets on the higher land, at a time when he thinks wide parts of 
the present American Continent depressed below the waterlevel and covered by an 
arctic sea. Even in rejecting this theoi-y, we must, however, reckon with a ree- 
mergeuce of the land while still arctic conditions prevailed. Farther north, however, 
the rising of the land began låter, and while in the south oscillations of level have 
taken place. the elevation of the northern lands seems to have been, on the whole, 
rather slow and uninterrupted up to the present time. About the total amouut of 
this elevation authors hold somewhat different views, from northern Labrador Bell, 
Glac. Phenom., for instance, speaks of raised beaches 1,500 feet above sealevel, 
SuTHERLÄND, Glac. Pheen., p. 300, records arctic shells up to nearly a thousand 
feet in Cornwallis Island and North Devon, Feilden, in the App. to Nares, Narrat., 
to a similar height in Grinnelland, while Schei has not seen marine terraces higher 
than 600 feet, and my own observations give similar figures. 
At all events this depression of the lands has been considerable enough to 
place most part of the present habitable ground under water and widen the channels 
between the islands more or less at the end of the glacial period. At the time 
when the climate began to be less severe and somewhat like that of the present 
time, and when the Polar Sea had again become connected with the southern 
oceans, our area thus must have been even more cut up than now, continuous över- 
land ways for plantmigrations can hardly have existed within the Archipelago, the 
plants have had to travel by the means discussed above, and doubtless principally 
over the frozen straits in wintertime. Farther south the coastlines after some 
oscillations seem to have come to rest long ago, but in the Arctic Archipelago, and 
probably on the north coast of the Continent also, the upward movement is still 
in progress This is shown by the appearance of undecayed driftwood up to several 
hundred feet above the shoreline, as reported by Bell, Feilden and de Rance, 
Geeely, Ingvarsson, and many of the officers examining the Parry Islands at the 
time of the Franklin search. 
Feilden and de Rance, Geol. Aret. Lands, p. 566, and App. to Nares, Narrat., 
p. 342, also speak of a fiud of stems of two species of Laminaria, now growing 
in the Polar Sea, occurring »in mudbeds at elevations of 200 feet, still retaining 
their peculiar sea shore odour». These deposits certainly must be rather recent, 
and some of the eskiuio relics also point to a very late elevation of the coasts. 
Among these I may inention houses and stone fish-traps, detected by Bell (Glac. 
Lands Universitets Årsskrift. N. F. Afd. 2. Bd 9. 20 
