ANTARCTICA: A VANISHED AUSTRAL LAND. 311 



bled the normal coiiditious of the globe siicli as tluit wliicli it now 

 enjoys." ' 



Many autborities are of opinion that great subsidences of land are 

 natural concomitants of a glacial period, and that it naturally follows 

 that the accumulation of ice at one pole must abstract and pile u^) a 

 large amount of water, and thus cause laud in the opposite hemisphere 

 to be uncovered. 



During the continuance, therefore, of the glacial epoch in the North- 

 ern Hemisphere, there must have existed over the Southern Hemisphere 

 an extremely genial epoch, during which there is no doubt that where- 

 ever land existed it was clothed with a luxuriant vegetation, and that 

 its boundaries would be enlarged from the causes just spoken of. This 

 vegetation would, doubtless, not be less varied and tropical than that 

 which flourished in high northern latitudes in Miocene times, and which 

 was still a remarkably temi)erate flora within 8^ degrees of the North 

 Pole, and it is evident that it could harbor, and on it there could 

 develop the ancestors of the fauna and flora whose descendants are now 

 scattered across all the southern regions of the globe. That an exten- 

 sive land did exist not dissimilar to that described in a former page, 

 seems to me almost an inevitable deduction from the distributional facts 

 adduced above— especially in regard to the insects, the marsupials, the 

 birds, and the plants. Of this mass of evidence, the distribution — to 

 shortly recapitulate — of tlie three trochleaed struthious birds in all the 

 great regions; the Aphanapteryx, the blue gallinules, the starlings, and 

 the crested parrots in Antipodea and Lemuria; the fresh- water fishes 

 of Australia and America — none of them northern forms — is, to me at 

 least, evidence not otherwise explicable. But none of that evidence 

 seems to me to testify with greater weight than the embryological and 

 anatomical data, which I have quoted from the writings of those dis- 

 tinguished workers, Parker and Forbes, two men of the highest 

 authority in their science, inasmuch as it has been detected, not in the 

 sui)erflcial characters only, but deep down in structures whose simi- 

 larity cannot but proclaim genetic relationship, through ancestors who 

 have now vanished, and whose homes must have been on a land com- 

 mon to and in connection with those widely separated regions which 

 their descendants now occupy. The necessity for the existence of a 

 land surface in the Antarctic Ocean was recognized and has been 

 expressed by Mr. Darwin. "New Zealand is plainly," he says, "related 

 to South America, which though the next nearest continent is enor- 

 mously remote, yet this difticulty disappears in the view that New Zea- 

 land, South America, and the other southern lands have been stocked in 

 part from the Antarctic islands when they were clothed with vegetation 

 during a warmer Tertiary period."^ Dr. Blanford, in his well-known 



' These various extracts are from The Cause of the Ice Age, by- Sir Robert Hall. 

 - Origin of Species, Vol. II, page 190, 1888. 



