BY CA.PTAIN P. W. HUTTON. 6l 



hemisphere) which do not bear out the conclusion forced upon us 

 by the majority of the facts, and the question arises : Have these 

 relationships been brought about by the former existence of more 

 land in the southern hemisphere, or can they be explained without 

 any such assumption 1 



The first discussion of the question was by Sir Joseph Hooker, 

 who, in 1853,* advocated a "larger and more continuous tract of 

 land than now exists " in the Antarctic Ocean to explain the 

 distribution of the flowering-plants of the Southern Islands. He 

 assigned no date to this extension of land, but, no doubt, supposed 

 it to be not very ancient. 



In 1870, Professor Huxley, in his Anniversary Address to the 

 G-eological Society of London, said that the simplest and most 

 rational mode of accounting for the differences between the 

 mammalian faunas of Australia, S. America, and Arctogsea, as 

 well as for the sudden appearance of Eutheria in the latter and 

 in S. America, is the supposition that a Pacific continent existed 

 in the Mesozoic era which gradually subsided, Australia being 

 separated at the end of the Triassic period before the higher 

 mammalia had come into existence. These Eutheria subsequently 

 migrated into North and South America when the Pacific conti- 

 nent finally sank. He says: — "The Mesozoic continent must, 

 I conceive, have lain to the east, about the shores of the N. 

 Pacitic and Indian Oceans, and I am inclined to believe that it 

 continued along the eastern side of the Pacitic area to what is now 

 the province of Austro-Columbia, the characteristic fauna of 

 which is probably a remnant of the population of the latter part 

 of this period."! 



In 1873 I proposed the following hypothesis to explain the 

 complicated problem of the origin of the New Zealand fauna. 

 An Antarctic Mesozoic continent which subsided in the upper 

 Cretaceous period. During the Lower Eocene a second extension 

 of land from New Zealand northwards so as to include New 



* Flora Novse Zealandise, Introduction, p. xxi. 

 t Quart. .Journ. Geo!. Soc. Vol. xxvi. p. Ixiii. 



