330 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



plain and continuous, and over the greater part of it, in clear 

 weather, the great dome of receding ice- cap is well visible. And 

 yet from this ice accumulation hundreds of glaciers are given 

 off whose terminal or sea walls are of much the same height as 

 the greater part of the Antarctic Barrier. Naturally, it can he 

 assumed that Antarctica is much less mountainous than Green- 

 land may, in fact, be a gently rising or almost flat plain and 

 that the great length of its glaciers, which marks off a termina- 

 tion possibly a hundred miles or more distant from the actual 

 border of the land, is that which prevents the land contours 

 themselves from being seen. But are there just grounds for a con- 

 tention of this kind ? 



The distinctiveness pf the antarctic climate as compared with 

 the arctic is found in the relations of both the summer and the 

 winter temperatures. The high summer heat of the north, which 

 in the few months of its existence has the energy to develop 

 that lovely carpeting of grass and flowers which gives to the low- 

 lying lands even to the eighty-second parallel of latitude a charm 

 equal to that of the upland meadows of Switzerland, is in a 

 measure wanting in the south; in its place frequent cold and 

 dreary fogs navigate the atmosphere, and render dreary and des- 

 olate a region that extends far into what may be properly desig- 

 nated the habitable zone. The fields of poppies, anemones, saxi- 

 frages, and mountain pinks, of dwarf birches and willows, are re- 

 placed by interminable snow and ice, with only Here and there 

 bare patches of rock to give assurance that something underlies 

 the snow covering. Man's habitations in the northern hemi- 

 sphere extend to the seventy- eighth parallel of latitude, and for- 

 merly extended to the eighty-second; in the southern hemisphere 

 they find their limit in Fuegia, in the fifty-fifth parallel, fully three 

 hundred and fifty miles nearer to the equator than where, as in 

 the Shetland Islands, ladies in lawn dresses disport in the game of 

 tennis. And still seven hundred miles farther from the equator, 

 in Siberia, Nordenskjold found forests of pine rising with trunks 

 seventy to one hundred feet in height. Yet it must not be sup- 

 posed that there are not, as is perhaps commonly assumed, gleams 

 of warm sunshine in this inhospitable south ; indeed, we have yet 

 to learn to what extent the far south is warm or cold. Thus, Cap- 

 tain Kristensen, the gallant commander of the Antarctic, who 

 made the first landing on what is assumed to be the mainland 

 of Antarctica, asserts that on January 5, 1895, when nearly on the 

 sixty-eighth parallel of latitude, " the sun at noon gave so much 

 heat that I took my coat off, and the crew were lying basking in 

 the sunshine on the forecastle '' (Transactions of the Royal Geo- 

 graphical Society of Australasia, Victorian Branch, March, 1896, 

 page 87) ; and Biscoe, writing on the IGth of January, 1831 (on 



