ANTARCTICA: A VANISHED AUSTRAL LAND. 307 



tically continuous, driven southward along- tliese continents by the 

 pressure of more specialized tyi)es, and now hnding refuge in these 

 widely separated southern lands. No one can differ from Mr. Wallace 

 on this subject without great diffidence, and certainly no one can feel a 

 profounder admiration, even veneration, than the present writer (who 

 has followed in so many of his footsteps in the archipelago he has made 

 famous, with his fascinating book as his best guide and companion) for 

 the opinions and writings of this most distinguished doyen of our 

 naturalists. Still, I can not persuade myself that this explanation covers 

 all tlie instances of discontinuous distribution — of forms unknown in 

 the Northern Hemisphere — which have been adduced in the foregoing 

 pages. It seems too extraordinary to be credible that ifc sliould alone 

 have been the same forms that have survived the vicissitudes of climate 

 and food during their long migrations through the deserts and forests 

 of Asia, Malaya, and Australia to reach ISTew Zealand; of Eurojie and 

 Africa to reach the Cape and Madagascar, and of North and South 

 America to arrive in Patagonia, and even in the Antarctic islands, and 

 that scarcely a single representative of their line should have survived 

 north of the equator. Nor does the explanation that has also been 

 oifered of the occurrence of the same genera and species in those 

 remote regions — that they have been the result of independent devel- 

 opment — appear to me to be more satisfactory; for the chances against 

 the same genus or species becoming developed inde])endently at various 

 times in three or four distinct regions of the globe, under different con- 

 ditions and latitudes, and only in the southern extremities of the great 

 continents, are enormously great. 



It has hitherto been laid down as a fundamental law in geographical 

 distribution that the areas inhabited by a given species, and in con- 

 sideral)le measure likewise by the same genera, are or have been 

 continuous with each other. The conclusion has been forced upon us, 

 therefore, that there must once have existed in the Southern Ocean a 

 land area common to the terminations of the great continents exten- 

 sive enough to afford room for the development of the ancestors of so 

 many forms of life absent from the Northern Hemisphere; and that it 

 was very genial in climate and clad with vegetation sufficiently luxu- 

 riant to support so varied a fauna. In studying the Southern Hemi- 

 sphere on a globe, on which the natural relations of land and water are 

 ■evident, and tracing out the continental shelf surrounding the exist- 

 ing Antarctic land within the contour of the 2,00()-fathom line, so far as 

 it is known, I was surprised to observe that the land that would result 

 from such an elevation of the Antarctic sea floor would explain the 

 perplexing distribution of the southern fauna and flora. It was also 

 evident that a continent so formed would not interfere with the opin- 

 ions entertained by so many of our highest geological authorities and 

 oceanographers, that the beds of the great oceans are troughs, and the 

 great meridianal land masses are buckles (in parts at one time dry and 



