appreciable lowering of the
climate. The facts, however, are somewhat complex, and we must proceed
with caution. It would seem that any general lowering of the temperature
of the earth ought to betray itself first in Greenland, but the flora
of Greenland remains far "warmer," so to say, than the flora of Central
Europe is to-day. Even toward the close of the Cretaceous its plants
are much the same as those of America or of Central Europe. Its fossil
remains of that time include forty species of ferns, as well as cycads,
ginkgoes, figs, bamboos, and magnolias. Sir A. Geikie ventures to say
that it must then have enjoyed a climate like that of the Cape or of
Australia to-day. Professor Chamberlin finds its flora like that of
"warm temperate" regions, and says that plants which then flourished in
latitude 72 degrees are not now found above latitude 30 degrees.

There are, however, various reasons to believe that it is unsafe to draw
deductions from the climate of Greenland. There is, it is true, some
exaggeration in the statement that its climate was equivalent to that
of Central Europe. The palms which flourished in Central Europe did not
reach Greenland, and there are differences in the northern Molluscs
and Echinoderms which--like the absence of corals above the north of
England--point to a diversity of temperature. But we have no right to
expect that there would be the same difference in temperature between
Greenland and Central Europe as we find to-day. If the warm current
which is now diverted to Europe across the Atlantic--the Gulf
Stream--had then continued up the coast of America, and flowed along
the coast of the land that united America and Europe, the climatic
conditions would be very different from what they are. There is a more
substantial reason. We saw that during the Mesozoic the Arctic continent
was very largely submerged, and, while Europe and America rise again at
the end of the Cretaceous, we find no rise of the land further north. A
difference of elevation would, in such a world, make a great difference
in temperature and moisture.

Let us examine the animal record, however, before we come to any
conclusion. The chronicle of the later Cretaceous is a story of
devastation. The reduction of the cyeads is insignificant beside the
reduction or annihilation of the great animals of the Mesozoic world.
The skeletons of the Deinosaurs become fewer and fewer as we ascend the
upper Cretaceous strata. In the u