Page:Transactions NZ Institute Volume 10.djvu/36

12 remotest times, for there are uo signs of glaciation in Japan proper.

Although Fusi-Yama (which, according to Japanese tradition, grew in a few days under the eyes of men, as Iorullo did), reared its imposing cone on the sea-board plain, that recently elevated region is but a narrow strip along the shore, and ice-marks ought to be seen on the flanks of its main chain of ancient hills, if the glacial epoch prevailed over the whole of the northern hemisphere simultaneously. But an intelligent traveller who has lately ridden over the interior of the island from north to south informed me that there were none visible on their eastern side; and the talented author of "Frost and Fire"—Mr. Campbell—has sought there also in vain for any testimony of the rocks to the continued reign of the first, whose signs are so familiar to him.

A deflection of the Pacific or Japan stream which flows on past the Kurile Islands, curving round by the Aleutian chain to the coasts of Oregon, causing a rainfall there nearly equal to that of Darjeeling in the Himalayas, would bring ice over the terraced gardens on the slopes of the "Matchless Mountain," and over the whole of Yesso; opposite the northern shores of which for many miles off the land, the sea is frozen every winter, in the latitude of Naples, in consequence of their being swept by that current which, escaping through narrow portals, flows round into the Yellow Sea, chilling the coasts of China. The British colony of Vancouver and Washington Territory, instead of being enveloped in fogs, would be reduced to the condition in which Britain itself was when no Gulf Stream came near its shores, and to which Greenland has been brought in recent times.

There not very long ago the oak grew, and animals throve where icestreams now flow, and there was a time still more remote when the magnolia blossomed and the vine clung to giant sequoias in its forests; and there may be another not so very far distant when the magnetic current (which may be the cause that produces this intense cold) may vary its direction and go further east again, and the eastern branch of the Gulf Stream may flow inside of Iceland; there Norway and Scandinavia will again have their age of ice, whilst the "lost land" may once more merit its now inappropriate name and be covered with green woods. It may be when the present Arctic Expedition returns, evidences will be produced of semi-tropical vegetation having flourished in still higher latitudes again at later geological eras than when the carboniferous vegetation prepared the material for the coal of high northern regions. Such a discovery as that the Pole itself is now situated in the centre of a land, in former ages covered with umbrageous forests, would clash violently with existing theories. * * *

Every process of evolution may, of course, be more readily conceived to be possible by assigning unlimited time for its performance. But if the