150 
PRESIDENT S ADDRESS. 
years we are indebted to Baron Nordenskidld and bis scientific 
companions for immense accessions to our knowledge of Polar 
geology, especially in Spitsbergen, JS’ovaya-Zemlj'-a, and Greenland. 
My own researcbes, and those of my associates, in Grinnell Land, 
the most northern portion of the globe in which fossil remains 
have been brought to light, and where the sequence of geological 
formations has been scientifically investigated, are of great interest, 
for by correlating them with geological discoveries in the Polar 
area on almost the opposite side of the hemisphere, avc can arrive 
with absolutely certainty at the fact, that the Polar Sea, as 
known to us, must be based on the same series of geological 
formations whicli crop out on its extreme verges. Thus the great 
series of Silurian rocks which extend over the Parry Archipelago, 
North Greenland, and Grinnell Land, have their counterparts 
in the Silurian rocks of Spitsbergen and Novaya-Zemlya. 
Mr. Etheridge (Quart. Journ. Geol. Soc., 1878, p. 578), thus refers 
to the conditions of that Palaeozoic sea, as exemplified by its fossil 
Sclerodermic Corals : — “ These undoubted reef-forming Corals of the 
Silurian epoch were just as much inhabitants of warm water in 
northern latitudes at that period, as are the Sclerodermata of 
to-day in the Indo-Pacific and Atlantic Oceans ; and as we know of 
no compound Coral that will exist at a lower temperature than 
G8^ E., and as the surface-water under the equator in the Pacific 
has a temperature of 85° E., and in the Atlantic 83°, it seems 
clear that the range from G8° to 85° E. is best adapted to, and not 
too high for, the growth of the reef-making species. We may 
fairly assume that the temperature of the Polar waters during 
Paheozoic times was as high as that of the Indo-Pacific and 
Atlantic now where Coral-reefs abound. We are not justified in 
supposing that the laws regulating oceanic life were very different 
then from those no^v existing (in the same groups) under the 
equator or between the tropics. These Corals were forms ot life 
which must have been tropical in habits and requirements. MA 
know nothing of the ancient isotherms or isothermal laws that 
then, as now, through temperature greatly governed or influenced 
the distribution of life over the globe, whether upon land or in the 
