534 
The British Association. 
[Odtober, 
question of possible changes in the position of the poles of 
the earth, and on other kindred speculations. Near Dis- 
covery Harbour, about latitude 8i° 40', Miocene beds were 
found containing a flora somewhat differing from that which 
was already known to exist within the Arctic regions. 
“The Grinnell Land lignite,” say the authors of the report, 
“ indicates a thick peat moss, with probably a small lake, 
with water lilies on the surface of the water and reeds on 
the edges, with birches, poplars, and taxodiums on the 
banks, and with pines, firs, spruce, elms, and hazel-bushes 
on the neighbouring hills.” When we consider, continued 
Dr. Evans, that all of the genera here represented have 
their present limits at least from twelve to fifteen degrees 
farther south, while the taxodium is now confined to 
Mexico and the south of the United States, such a sylvan 
landscape as that described seems entirely out of place in a 
district within six hundred miles of the pole, to which 
indeed, if land then extended so far, these Arcffic forests 
must have also extended in Miocene times. Making all 
allowance for the possibility of the habits of such plants 
being so changed that they could subsist without sunlight 
during six months of a winter of even longer duration, he 
could not see how so high a temperature as that which 
appears necessary, especially for the evergreen varieties, 
could have been maintained, assuming that Grinnell Land 
was then as close to the North Pole as it is at the present 
day. Nor is this difficulty decreased when we look back to 
formations earlier than the Miocene, for the flora of the 
secondary and palaeozoic rocks of the Ardtic regions is iden- 
tical in character with that of the same rocks when occurring 
twenty or thirty degrees farther south, while the corals, 
encrinites, and cephalopods of the carboniferous limestone 
are such as, from all analogy, might be supposed to indicate 
a warm climate. 
The general opinion of physicists as to the possibility of 
a change in the position of the earth’s axis has, continued 
the president, recently undergone modifications somewhat 
analogous in character to those which, in the opinion of some 
geologists, the position of the axis has itself undergone. In- 
stead of a fixed dogma as to the impossibility^ change, we find 
a divergence of mathematical opinion and variations of the 
pole differing in extent, allowed by different mathematicians 
who have of late gone into the question. All agree in the 
theoretical possibility of a change in the geographical posi- 
tian of the earth’s axis of rotation being affedted by a 
redistribution of matter on the surface, but they do not 
