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president’s address. 
the scale in favour of the retention of European species in high 
Arctic latitudes during the Glacial Epoch, for in ‘ Appendix to the 
Voyage of the Isbiorn’ (1881), he writes, regarding the differences 
between the floras of Novaya Zemlya, Spitsbergen, West Greenland, 
and Smith’s Sound (Lat. 71° to 82° N.) : “Whereas there is no 
difficulty in assuming that Novaya Zemlya and the American Polar 
Islands have been peopled with plants by immigration from the 
south, no such assumption will explain the European character of 
the Greenland, and especially of the high northern Greenland 
vegetation, the main features of which favour the supposition that 
it retains many plants which arrived from Europe by a route that 
crossed the Polar area itself, when that area was under geographical 
and climatal conditions which no longer obtain.” This opinion 
coincides in part with that of Warming : “It is, perhaps, not 
only possible, but even probable, that at a very remote period, 
before the Glacial Epoch, there existed around the North Pole a 
great continent to which Europe and America were then united, 
and which would explain the numerous agreements which their 
vegetation presents.” And I understand him to say elsewhere, it is 
not Smith’s Sound which is the separation between the present 
floras of America and Europe, but Denmark Strait, between 
Greenland and Iceland. This land connexion must have been in 
existence, if it ever did exist, before the commencement of the 
Glacial Epoch, for North Greenland has never yet emerged from 
that epoch even up to the present time, and we can hardly suppose 
much immigration of a European flora under the conditions that 
still obtain there. 
But you may think it useless to spend so much time on a flora 
so far removed from our own as that of Greenland. The reason 
for doing so is, that by consideration of what is now taking place 
in that country under glacial conditions, we may hope to obtain a 
glimpse at what probably happened to the flora of our own country 
under similar conditions. It will hardly be unfair to compare a 
space of four degrees of latitude in the centre of the coast of 
West Greenland, with a space of the same number of degrees in 
Great Britain, which may be said to contain the greater part of what 
