to be derived from fossils, even the leaves of plants are vastly more valuable then the hard parts of animals. For instance, the bones of elephants and rhinoceroses found in Greenland would not prove a warm climate; because the creatures might have been protected from cold with hair like that of the musk-sheep, and they might have had facilities for annual migrations like the bisons. The occurrence of bones of reindeer in France does not prove that its climate was like that of Lapland; but only that it was wooded, and that the animals could rove at will to the hills and to the coast. But, on the other hand, the remains of an evergreen oak in Greenland constitute absolute proof of a warm and equable climate; and the occurrence of leaves of the dwarf birch in France constitutes a proof of a cool climate, worth more then that which can be derived from the bones of millions of reindeer and musk-sheep. Still further, in all those greater and more difficult questions of geology which relate to the emergence and submergence of land areas, and to the geographical conditions of past geological periods, the evidence of plants, especially when rooted in place, is of far more value then that of animals, though it has yet been very little used. This digression prepares the way for the question: Was the Miocene period on the whole a better age of the world then that in which we live? In some respects it was. Obviously there was in the Northern Hemisphere a vast surface of land under a mild and equable climate, and clothed with a rich and varied vegetation. Had we lived in the Miocene, we might have sat under our vine and fig-tree equally in Greenland and Spitzbergen and in those more southern climes to which this privilege is now restricted. We might have enjoyed a great variety of rich and nutritive fruits, and, if sufficiently muscular, and able to cope with the gigantic mammals of the period, we might have engaged in either the life of the hunter or that of the agriculturist under advantages which we do not now possess. On the whole, the Miocene presents to us in these respects the perfection of the Neozoic time, and its culmination in so far as the nobler forms of brute animals and of plants are concerned. Had men existed in those days, however, they should have been, in order to suit the conditions surrounding them, a race of giants; and they would probably have felt the want of many of those more modern species belonging to the flora and fauna of Europe and Western Asia on which man has so much depended for his civilization. Some reasons have been adduced for the belief that in the Miocene and Eocene there were intervals of cold climate; but the evidence of this may be merely local and exceptional, and does not interfere with the broad characteristics of the age as sketched above.