Falklands, etc.] FLORA ANTARCTICA. 219 



Kerguelen's Land is the eastern limit to which the Fuegian Flora extends, and though 

 placed within the 50th degree its desolate nature is proverbial. The Antarctic Expedition arrived 

 there in May 1 840, having been blown off its tempestuous coast twice, after approaching the land 

 so nearly as to distinguish almost the nature of the vegetation which skirts the shores of the bays. 

 The island presents a black and rugged mass of sterile mountains, rising by parallel steppes one 

 above another in alternate slopes and precipices, terminating in frightful naked and frowning 

 cliffs, which dip perpendicularly into the sea. The snow lying upon these slopes between the 

 black cliffs gave a most singularly striped or banded appearance to the whole country, each 

 band indicating a flow of volcanic matter, for the island is covered with, craters whose vents 

 have given issue to stream upon stream of molten rock. These are worn all along the coasts 

 into abrupt escarpments, rendering a landing impracticable, except at the heads of the sinuous 

 bays. One bluff headland to the north end of the island is a precipice, 700 feet high, and 

 exposes such numerous sections of horizontal deposits of red, black, and grey volcanic matter 

 that it is difficult to count them, though overlaying one another with perfect regularity and 

 uniformity. Sterile as Kerguelen's Land now is, it was not always so, vast beds of coal are 

 covered by hundreds of consecutive layers of igneous and other rocks, piled to a height of 

 one thousand feet and upwards, upon what was once a luxuriant forest. Throughout many 

 of the lava streams are found prostrate trunks of fossil trees of no mean girth, and the 

 incinerated remains of recent ones, which had been swallowed up simultaneously with the 

 fossil, and these occur hi strata of various ages, so that it seems impossible to reckon the 

 period of time that must have elapsed between the origin, growth, and destruction of the 

 successive forests now buried in one hill. A section of such a hiU woidd display coal-beds 

 and shale resting upon a blue basalt, at the level of the sea, covered again with wliinstone, 

 whereon are deposited successive layers of volcanic sand, baked clay-stones, porphyries, and 

 long hues of basaltic cliffs, formed of perpendicular prisms, regularly shaped like those of 

 Staffa or the Giant's Causeway, and along which the traveller may walk even for a mile with- 

 out ascending or descending fifty feet. To calculate the time required for the original formation 

 and following silicification of one such forest, and to multiply that by the equal number of 

 different superincumbent strata, containing remains similar to those displayed at the north 

 end of Kerguelen's Land, would give a startling number of years, during which periods the 

 island must have deserved a better name than that of " Desolation." And if to this be added 

 the time requisite for the deposit of the arenaceous beds containing the impressions of Fuci, 

 of the clays afterwards hardened by fire, and of the prismatic cliffs, which, with the arenaceous, 

 indicate that the land was alternately submerged and exposed as often as these successive 

 formations occur, such a sum would bespeak an antiquity for the flora of this isolated speck on 

 the surface of our globe far beyond our powers of calculation. If from the narrow sphere of in- 

 quiry that a few miles in extent and 1000 feet of elevation in Kerguelen's Land afford we deduce 

 such grand results, what must be expected from the investigation of whole continents, whose 

 culminant peaks reach nearly 30,000 feet, sxu'rounded by an ocean perhaps as elevated above 



