308 ANTARCTICA: A VANISHED AUSTRAL LAND. 



at another submerged) of the earth's crust, both of which have practi- 

 cally been permaneut since primeval times, or to quote Mr. Darwin, 

 tbat "where our oceans now extend, oceans have extended from the 

 remotest period of which we have any record; and where conthients 

 now exist large tracts of land have existed, subjected, no doubt, to 

 great oscillations of level since the Cambrian period." 



The boundaries of this continent of Antarctica, as I have proposed 

 to designate it, would have united Patagonia, New Zealand (as part 

 of sucli a large continental island as I have described and named 

 Antipodea, on page 209), Tasuuinia with East Australia, and that old 

 island continent (joined, perhaps, by a narrow commissure, for a longer 

 or shorter time, to East Africa), which Dr. Sclater long- ago named 

 Ijemuria, to a circumpolar land greater than at present by extensive 

 independent peninsulas, between which the Atlantic, the Pacitic, and 

 the Indian oceans extended almost as far south as they do now. It 

 will be observed that South Africa is excluded in this view from actual 

 contact with this southern continent. That it did not remain so long- 

 as the others in direct connection with Antarctica seems indicated by 

 the presence of so aberrant a form of the struthious family in that 

 country as its ostriches, which possess on their tarso-metatarsal bones 

 two articulatory trochlcie only, thus reducing theirs to a two toed 

 instead of a tiiree-toed foot, as is found in the moas, the A^Jpyornis, the 

 cassowaries, the emus, and the Brontornis. The loss of this toe points 

 unquestionably to a very long isolation of the ostrich from inter- 

 marriage with the more normal members of its order. The African 

 ostriches also differ from the eastern members of the family, in having 

 no after- shaft to their contour feathers, a character in which they 

 agree with the rheas of South America, a group to which the African 

 ostriches are more closely, though still very distantly, related than 

 perhaps to any of the others. It would seem highly probable also that 

 the connection between South America and Africa was severed at a 

 very early period — an assumi)tion supported by the distribution of the 

 fresh-water fishes of Patagonia and South Africa, which, though indi- 

 cating, as Dr. Giinther has so well elucidated, by the undoubted affini- 

 ties between them, a previous approximation of the two regions, yet in 

 the distinctness of their genera plainly speaks of a long disseverance. 

 The boundaries of this Antarctic continent, which I have indicated, 

 would have inclosed all the circumpolar land and the islands in the 

 Southern Sea. Actual, apart from deductive, evidence for the exist- 

 ence of a greater extension of land in this region is of course very 

 limited, yet it is not altogether absent. 



No visitor to the Chatham Islands can fail to be struck by the num- 

 ber of lakes and tarns that everywhere dot the landscape. Nor can he 

 travel far without remarking that the surface of the ground is covered 

 by a continuous layer of peat, which is in many places 40 to 50 feet 

 deep, and in some still unfathomed. It is in general solid enough 



