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PROF. J. LOGAN LOBLEY, F.G.S., F.R.G.S., ON 
Discussion. 
Mr. David Howard, F.C.S. — This interesting paper suggests many 
questions some of which it is perhaps impossible to answer. It is 
curious to find types of animals which formerly existed in both the 
New and the Old World and have died out in the New. Can we 
be sure that the types now found have continuously existed in the 
New World, or may not some at any rate have become extinct and 
been reintroduced from the Old World. 
The question of ancient continents uniting, Europe and America, 
or India and Africa is fascinating to dream of, but difficult to prove. 
Such an idea requires of course relative alterations of elevation ; 
and it must be remembered that any great upheaval from the 
bottom of the sea unless counterbalanced by a corresponding 
depression elsewhere would greatly alter this sea level. 
Mr. Bouse. — In his able and exhaustive paper Professor Lobley 
has identified no American species of terrestrial mammal with any 
species native to the Old World ; but one may say that the caribou 
is not determined to be specifically distinct from the reindeer of 
Lapland, that the polar bear is found along the northern coasts of 
Asia as well as of America, and that in the preserve of bisons made 
at Winnipeg some years ago, those beasts w r ere found, if memory 
serves me correctly, to yield fertile offspring with the domestic cow. 
If the last fact be true, the progenitors of the bison may have easily 
been brought over in the first immigration by the Indians who first 
passed from Kamschatka into Alaska across the ice ; and as for the 
polar bear and the reindeer they both undoubtedly crossed over 
polar icefields from the Old to the New World ; the bear, as it is, 
often drifting for hundreds of miles upon icebergs and having been 
found swimming eighty miles from any land and with no ice in 
sight {Living Animals of the World, p. 124). These, however, are all 
the species that America shares with the other continents ; whereas, 
if we accept the Darwinian theory and suppose Atlantis to have 
sunk out of sight a few hundred years before Plato wrote of it, we 
should nevertheless expect very many of the species that had 
