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racter pervades all the extensive Tertiary deposits of temperate North America, we shall, I think, be forced to the conclusion that no general glacial epochs could have occurred during their formation. It must be remembered that the "imperfection of the geological record" will not help us here, because the series of Tertiary deposits is unusually complete, and we must suppose some destructive agency to have selected all the intercalated glacial beds and to have so completely made away with them that not a fragment remains, while preserving all or almost all the _interglacial_ beds; and to have acted thus capriciously, not in one limited area only, but over the whole northern hemisphere, with the local exceptions on the flanks of great mountain ranges already referred to. _Temperate Climates in the Arctic Regions._--As we have just seen, the geological evidence of the persistence of sub-tropical or warm climates in the north temperate zone during the greater part of the Tertiary period is almost irresistible, and we have now to consider the still more extraordinary series of observations which demonstrate that this amelioration of climate extended into the Arctic zone, and into countries now almost wholly buried in snow and ice. These warm Arctic climates have been explained by Dr. Croll as due to periods of high excentricity with winter in _perihelion_, a theory which implies alternating {71} epochs of glaciation far exceeding what now prevails; and it is therefore necessary to examine the evidence pretty closely in order to see if this view is more tenable in the case of the north polar regions than we have found it to be in that of the north temperate zone. The most recent of these milder climates is perhaps indicated by the abundant remains of large mammalia--such as the mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, bison and horse, in the icy alluvial plains of Northern Siberia, and especially in the Liakhov Islands in the same latitude as the North Cape of Asia. These remains occur not in one or two spots only, as if collected by eddies at the mouth of a river, but along the whole borders of the Arctic Ocean; and it is generally admitted that the animals must have lived upon the adjacent plains, and that a considerably milder climate than now prevails could alone have enabled them to do so. How long ago this occurred we do not know, but one of the last intercalated mild periods of the glacial epoch itself seems to offer all the ne
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