Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, 1931-10-18

pigs, ana 0t nc TiSHt IS cTeG'
land bridge, not once, but many times And
land bridges by way Of Greenland and Iceland
to Europe may have existed also: the ocean is
comparatively shallow at that end most of the
way.
What these Northern lands may have been
like, in days when there was no permanent ice,
can be left to the romantic imagination. Fos-
sill leaves of trees like those now found in Calis
fornia and the Gulf States. as well as those
of the cooler, but still rich lands of Michigan
and New York have been found in Greenland.
VAST stretches of Northern Siberia and Cam
ada, now dreary tundra and swamp and
muskeg. or at best dense spruce growth, were
once covered with game-filled hardwood timber
like the virgin forests of the Ohio and Missis-
sppi Valleys. Only they had stranger beasts
in them-rhinoceros and elephant and giant
bison. well as the more familiar deer and
wild pig.
Then the uneasiness of slow upheaval, the
increasing chill. the shortening Summer and
the diminishing Of the familiar food supplies.
Some beasts perish some change their habits
to meet the new conditions: perhaps, most Of
them wander restleSsly southWard. edging year
by year q little more toward the lands of the
SUM-
casionally to go back to the old home. but they
would always run into forests where they could
not find the right kind of food. or cold nights
that made them glad to resume their southwark
trek, or quaking boys that would swallow them,
meat and bones, if they persisted in attempting
to cross.
II any of them had been able to push on
northward, after a suitable lapse of centuries
they would have come at last to a barrier that
nothing without wings could cross; mountainous
ice, stretching endlessly back toward the North,
This ice was more than blockade to north.
ward travel on either continent: it was closed
door. The ring of land around the Pole was
broken; East was East and West was West,
and the animals Of America, cut off from those
of the Old World. could no longer intermigrste
and interbreed. Hence the development Of
separate species below the barrier.
Strangely enough, although ice covered Amer
lea about as far South as the Ohio River, and
Europe from the Arctic Ocean to the Alps.
there was no glaciation in Asia. All Of Name
churia, Mongolia, Eastern Siberia. were ices
free
THAT does not mean that they were not cold.
They probably had very severe Winters,
but in Summer the ground thawed out and
raised its usua! crop of plants, and herds Of
animals grazed and b-owsed and wandered
where they would
Interior Alaska was also unglaciated, and
probably there was a land bridge to Asia, 50
that during that time there was free migration
OF such creatures as the great hairy mammoth
and the musk-ox between the two continents,
Only they could not get southwark, for ads
vance along the West coast of North America
was blocked by the Cordilleran glacier front
coming down to the
The southwark migration of the animals did
not take place as a single. gradual, co-ordinated
movement in Prof Matthews opinion. In
stead there were a number of separate dispers-
ais, or waves Of migration perhaps, one to each
slow CONFUSION of the earth.
The most advanced of animals, Prof. Mat
thew pointed cut came down out of the cold
lands latest and are still found predomnantly
in north temperate and subtropical regions:
dogs and wolves, bears and raccoons, weasels
and offers, deer and horses, and cats Of all
degrees.
Man himself is no exception. Australia,
which gives asylum to the largest remnant Of
the primitive first dispersal wave of animals,
also has the most primitive of living human
races. Other dark races less primitive, but
still unbalanced, occupy the forest lands Of
the Southern continental projections sharing
them, by the way, with mans lesser cousins,
the apes and monkeys.
In the North, nearest the roots Of the old
glaciers, the most intelligent and progressive
races have built their civilizations in Europe
and Asia, and have transplanted their culture
to that other glacier secured continent; North