ANTARCTICA: A VANISHED AUSTRAL LAND. 309 



to permit safe traffic over it, but extensive areas are covered with 

 unsuspected wet bogs extremely dangerous to a pedestrian unacquainted 

 with the country. The time required for the accumuhition of this 

 enormous deposit maybe imagined when it is remembered that it takes 

 several feet of sphagnum — the moss of which peat is chiefly composed — 

 as seen growing on the surface of the bog, to form 1 inch of dense 

 black peat at its bottom. Everywhere throughout those peat bogs 

 trunks of trees, larger than and of a different sort to those that now 

 grow in the islands, lie entombed. They are the remains of ancient 

 forests which have succumbed "to the chilling effects of the wet bog 

 mosses in their upward growth." The woods that now or did recently 

 (for they are fast disappearing before the demands of the agriculturist) 

 cover the gronnd are but the latest of a succession of forests already 

 swallowed up tliat had in turn taken possession of the land wherever 

 the water had drained away and the growth of the mosses ceased.^ 

 The antiquity of these islands is proved by the fact that in different 

 places the more ancient of these peat beds have become consolidated 

 into lignite. 



This account of the surface features of the Chatham Islands might 

 serve e([ually for those of Kerguelen Land, which also abounds in large 

 bogs, in lakes and great pools in the hills, and in fiords — all evidences 

 of great anticpiity, of glaciation jDrobably, and certainly of very exten- 

 sive subsidence. In the Auckland Islands also occur bogs and beds of 

 bituminous peat; while both in the Crozets and in Kerguelen Land 

 fossil trunks of large trees have been found, all distinctly i)ointing to 

 the existence of extensive and varied forests on these now sleet-swept, 

 bare, inhospitable lands. The prevalent features of the present flora 

 of Kerguelen are Fuegian, many of the species in both regions being 

 identical or nearly related, while others are common to Tasmania, and 

 still others to one or more of the unsubmerged fragments of Antipodea 

 (New Zealand and its surrounding islands), and some to all these three 

 regions, one fern being common to Kerguelen and the Cape of Good 

 Hope. To Kerguelen Land and to Marion Island, 1,600 miles west of 

 it, is confined a still more remarkable genus of plants, known as Pring- 

 lea. It is very distinct, is without near relatives, and is the survivor 

 of a flora unknown in any other i)art of the globe. Its seeds are per- 

 ishable, and on this account it is very unlikely that it has been con- 

 veyed by birds from one island to the other; and is therefore with 

 high iirobability indigenous to both. Its distribution to those isolated 

 spots, and various " phenomena, besides, common to the tliree archi- 

 pelagoes — Kerguelen, Crozets, and Marion — favor," in the opinion of 

 Sir Josei)h Hooker and other high botanical authorities, the " inference 

 - - - that these constitute the wrecks of either an ancient continent 



' The reader is referred to a very interesting little volume on British mosses, where 

 their relation to ancient forests is dealt with, by the Ri.nlit Hon. Sir Edward Fry, 

 and to liis paper in the Proceedings of the Royal Institution, 1892. 



