und at
many other Arctic localities, especially in Iceland, on the Mackenzie River
in 65deg N. Lat. and in Alaska. As an intermediate station we have, in the
neighbourhood of Dantzic in Lat. 55deg N., a similar flora, with the
swamp-cypress, sequoias, oaks, poplars, and some cinnamons, laurels, and
figs. A little further south, near Breslau, north of the Carpathians, a
rich flora has been found allied to that of Oeninghen, but wanting in some
of the more tropical forms. Again, in the Isle of Mull in Scotland, in
about 56-1/2deg N. Lat., a plant-bed has been discovered {74} containing a
hazel, a plane, and a sequoia, apparently identical with a Swiss Miocene
species.

We thus find one well-marked type of vegetation spread from Switzerland and
Vienna to North Germany, Scotland, Iceland, Greenland, Alaska, and
Spitzbergen, some few of the species even ranging over the extremes of
latitude between Oeninghen and Spitzbergen, but the great majority being
distinct, and exhibiting decided indications of a decrease of temperature
according to latitude, though much less in amount than now exists. Some
writers have thought that the great similarity of the floras of Greenland
and Oeninghen is a proof that they were not contemporaneous, but
successive; and that of Greenland has been supposed to be as old as the
Eocene. But the arguments yet adduced do not seem to prove such a
difference of age, because there is only that amount of specific and
generic diversity between the two which might be produced by distance and
difference of temperature, under the exceptionally equable climate of the
period. We have even now examples of an equally wide range of well-marked
types; as in temperate South America, where many of the genera and some of
the species range from the Straits of Magellan to Valparaiso--places
differing as much in latitude as Switzerland and West Greenland; and the
same may be said of North Australia and Tasmania, where, at a greater
latitudinal distance apart, closely allied forms of Eucalyptus, Acacia,
Casuarina, Stylidium, Goodenia, and many other genera would certainly form
a prominent feature in any fossil flora now being preserved.

_Mild Arctic Climates of the Cretaceous Period._--In the Upper Cretaceous
deposits of Greenland (in a locality not far from those of the Miocene age
last described) another remarkable flora has been discovered, agreeing
generally with that of Europe and North America of the same geological