Tropical Forests in Greenland.

Thames Star, Volume XXX, Issue 9113, 6 July 1898, Page 4

Tropical Forests in Greenland.

Two scientists, Charles Schuchert and David White, have just returned from the wilds of West Greenland bringing back valuable collections. In a, region of everlasting ice and snow they have been exploring luxuriant tropical forests Far to the north of the Arctic Circle they have been exploring a flora consisting of palms, tree ferns, and other plants belonging properly to the neighbourhood of the equator.

These forests, however, and the trees and varied forms of plant life which compose them are exceedingly ancient.

In fact, they disappeared from the face of the earth several millions of years ago, and only their fossil remains are found buried in the strata of the rocks.

Greenland was once upon a time a tropical country. That is proved absolutely by the remains of an extensive tropical flora which are found there.. Where now a solid sheet of ice over a mile thick covers mountain and valley, and mighty frozen rivers, called: glaciers, make their way to the sea and hatch icebergs, there was in earlier days a verdure clad wilderness of luxuriant vegetation. Together with the palms and tree ferns there were trees related to the giant sequoias of our own West Coast, also representatives of the " Gingko," the sacred tree of Japan, and ot the eucalyptus family, which today is restricted to Australia. Climbing vines festooned the. trunks of these monarchs of an ancient forest with draperies of foliage, while close to the ground grew those curious dwarf trees called •' cycards," somewhat resembling palms in miniature.

j Messrs Schuchert and White accompanied the Peary expedition, juat returrtpd, The Navy Department of the United States provided them with a whalebOßC 28ft long, which was used by the United States steamship Yantic wben she sank in Arctic waters. The Hope landed them with their boat at Ooinenak Island, in the Oomenak Pioar.

Governor Kneutsen secured /or the expedition four Greenlanders. Most of these people have an admixture of Danish blood, and they do not like to be called Esquimaux, which is a term bestowed originally iv contempt, meaning " fish eaters." A sailor from the Hope also went along. They started out in the whaleboat on August 10 and landed on the Noursoak Peninsula. There they collected the first fossil plants, gathering them up to an elevation of 2000 ft.

The tropical plant beds were over* laid by the later formation, in which it was hoped to find remains «f seals and whales, but there was no trace of any animal life. In this upper deposit, however, were masses of fossil plants in layers two or three inches thick. This formation contains seams of an impure kind of coal, more properly called lignite, which is mined by the Danish Governors for their winter fuel. The natives burn turf and blubber. Some students from different colleges, who accompanied the Hope exploring expedition more for sport than for anything else, landed in Baffin Land, at Cape Haven, where there is an American trading station. They took two whaleboats and some natives and made their way to the head of Frobisher Bay. Inci dently they rediscovered Silliman's Fossil Mount, which was so named by Captain Hall, the Arctic explorer. They secured seventy species of molluscs, corals, trilobites, etc. The trilobites were especially interesting, inasmuch as they were crustaceans of a type long ago extinct—the ancestors of lobsters and crabs. Mr Schuchert dug up some very old graves, which were merely heaps of rocks covered with thia slabs of sandstone. They contained perfectly preserved skeletons,

The finding of the oldest bard wood plant yet known in the world was, perhaps, the most interesting discovery of the expedition. It was a species of poplar, and the tree grew during the epoch already described, when Greenland was covered with tropical forests. This Wig in the early part of that age which geologists call the cretaceous —that is to say not less, in all probability, than 5,000,000 years ago. The later cretaceous flora of the Noursoak region, as proved by the fossils, must have embraced many hardwood trees which were of the eance j genera as those which flourished at thai same period along the eas coast ufl North AttWitt (TOW Cap Cod, south!

ward and around into the Gulf States. They included representatives of the tulip tree, the poplar, the magnolia, the willow, the eucalyptus, and the sassafras. Apparently at that time the climate of Greenland was much like that of the Gulf States to-day. All the evidence seems to point to the conclusion that climates all over the world in that ancient epoch were pretty much the same. There was a uniformity of vegetation in all parts of the earth Nobody can say just why this was, though several theories have been advanced to account for it. One theory is that the atmosphere in those days was heavily charged with watery vapour, so that warmth was readily distributed through it, and the sun's rays did not have a chance to strike the earth uninterrupted, makiag differences in climate by the degree of their slant. In the course of time the atmosphere thinned gradually, and then there came to he climatic variations, marking a series of zones around the globe. Eventually arrived the tertiary epoch, which was the last great £ eological period before that in which we live, which is the quarternary. It was at the beginning of that age that mammals first made their appearance on the earth, so far as in known. No remains of tertiary mammals, however, have been discovered in Greenland, though the mammoth, the mastodon, the woolly rhinoceros, and other creatures belonging to that epoch may have existed there. The expedition found the regie n about Nouno ik very rich in the remains of the tertiary trees and other plants.