Mower County transcript. [volume] (Lansing, Minn.) 1868-1915, 1889-11-20
GEOLOGICAL WONDERS.
When Hot House Conditions Prevailed In
i35 All Parts OF Our Globe.

GEOLOGICAL WONDERS.
When Hot House Conditions Prevailed In
AL Parts Of Our Globe.
All through the primary and sec.
ondary epochs Of geology, it is now
pretty certain, hot-house conditions
practically prevailed almost without q
break over the whole world from pole
TO pole. 1t may be true, indeed, as
DIR. Croll believes (and his reasoning
on the point, ! confess, is fairly con.
v1ncing), that from time to time glar
clal periods in one or other hemisphere
broke in for awhile upon the genial
warmth that characterized the greater
part OF those vast and Unreasonable
primeval cons, But even if that were
so-if ut long intervals the world for
some hours in its cosmical year was
chilled and frozen in an insignificant
cap at either extremity-these casual
episodes in q long story do not
interfere with the general truth
of the principle that life as a
whole during the greater portion OF
it's antique existence has boon carried
on under essentially tropical condi-
tions. No matter what geological
formation we examine, we find every
where the same tale unfolded in plain
inscriptions before our eyes. Take,
for example, the giant club-mosses
and luxuriant tree-ferns nature-printed
on shales of the coal age in Britain,
and we see in the wild underground OF.
those paleozoic forests ample evidence
of a warm and almost West Indian
climate among the low basking islets
OF our northern carboniferous seas.
Or take once more the oolitic epoch in
England, Autographed on it's own mad,
with its puzzle monkeys and it's sage
palms. its crocodiles and it's deinosaurs,
its winged pterodactyls and it's whale
like lizards. All these huge creatures
and these broad-leaved trees plainly
indicate the existence of temporal
ture over the whole of Northern Eu-
rope almost as warm as that of the
Malay Archipelago in our own day.
The weather report for all the earlier
ages stands almost uninterruptedly at
set fair. Roughly speaking, indeed,
one may say that through the long
series of primary and secondary for
nations hardly a trace can be found of
the ice or snow, autumn or winter.
leafess boughs or pinched and starved
deciduous vegetation. Every thing is
powerful, luxuriant, vivid. Life, as
Comus feared, was strangled with its
waste fertility. Once indeed, in the
Permian age, all over the temperate
regions. north and south, we get pass
ing indications of what seem very like
a glacial epoch, partially comparable
to that great glaeiation On whose last
fringe we still abide to-day. But
the ice age of the Permian, if
such there were, passed away
entirely leaving the world once more
warm and fruitful up to the very poles,
under conditions which we would now
describe as essentially tropical. 1t was
with the tertiary period perhaps, in
deed, only with the middle subdivision
Of that period-that the gradual cook
ing of polar and intermediate regions
began. We know from the deposits OF
the chalk epoch in Greenland that late
in secondary times ferns, magnolias.
myrtles and sago palms-an Indian Or
Mexican fora-fourished exceedingly
in what is now the dreariest and most
ice-clad region of the northean hemis-
phere. Later still, in the eoeene days,
though the, plants. of Greenland had
grown slightly more temperate in
type, we still: find among the fossils NOT
only oaks, planes. vines and walnuts,
but also wellingtonias, like the big
trees of California, Spanish chestnuts,
quaint Southern, salisburias, broad
,leaved liqnidambars> and American
sassafras. Nay. even in glacier-clad
Spitzbergenitself, where the character
of the flora already begins, to- show
signs of inoipient chilling We never
theless see. among the eoceae types
such plants as the. swamp cyprus of
the Caroinas and the wellingtonias of
the far West together with rich for.
est vegetation of poplars, birehes,
oaks, planes, hazels,. walalts> water
lilies andtirises. As a. whole this veg
citation stall bespeaks, aclimate oonsid-
erably more, genial, mild and equable
than that Of modern, England. MUIR
rays Magazine.
Mis. Grudge Deep One.