Contributions of Botanical Science to the Knowledge of Postglacial Climates

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Abstract
Botanical science contributes to the knowledge of postglacial climates through inference from fossils and from the distribution of existing vegetation. In the first field the materials include complete plant communities of the past preserved intact and individual plants and plant parts. The bogs of the glaciated region furnish as evidence successive layers of peat of differing character and pollen grains of plants which grew at successive periods. Analysis of the pollen content of the stratified bog deposits is yielding a wealth of evidence concerning post-Pleistocene forest history and therefore as to the concomitant climatic sequence. In inference from present distribution of vegetation, relic colonies of plants are considered indicators of earlier dominance of types different from those of today and therefore of climatic change. There is almost universal agreement among students of these phenomena that the evidence from fossils and from present distribution indicates a postglacial climatic sequence as follows: from glacial through boreal to a warm and probably dry middle period, followed by a return to the cooler and probably moister conditions of the present. Several nonbotanical lines of investigation provide evidence supporting or consistent with this sequence.

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