The British islands formed a connected part of
Europe. The Thames and the Rhine were one and the same
river, flowing towards the Arctic ocean over a plain that
is now the shallow sunken bed of the North Sea. It is
probable that during the last great age, the Quaternary,
as geologists call it, the upheaval of what is now the
region of Siberia and Alaska, made a continuous chain of
land from Asia to America. As the land was depressed
again it left behind it the islands in the Bering Sea,
like stepping-stones from shore to shore. In the same
way, there was perhaps a solid causeway of land from
Canada to Europe reaching out across the Northern Atlantic.
Baffin Island and other islands of the Canadian North
Sea, the great sub-continent of Greenland, Iceland, the
Faroe Islands, and the British Isles, all formed part of
this continuous chain.
As the last of the great changes, there came the Ice Age,
which profoundly affected the climate and soil of Canada,
and, when the ice retreated, left its surface much as we
see it now. During this period the whole of Canada from
the Atlantic to the Rocky Mountains lay buried under a
vast sheet of ice.
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