312 ANTARCTICA: A VANISHED AUSTRAL LAND. 



address to the Geological Society of Loudon, in 1S90, gave it as liis 

 opinion that "if the difficulty about the depth of the intervening ocean 

 is overcome" — and such a continent as I have sketched out in the 

 rough, whose shores, more or less, followed the 2,000-fathom line, pre- 

 sents no insui)erable bathj-metrical difficulties to acceptance — "there 

 is no improbability in the suggestion that at some i)eriod of geolog- 

 ical history au important continent, having" connections with South 

 America, South Africa, and New Zealand, may have occupied the 

 Antarctic area." 



Tliroughout his wonderful papers on the embryology of the bird's 

 skull. Professor Parker' constantly perceives and insists on the neces- 

 sity of dividing birds into northern and southern forms: " In the South 

 the most struthious tyjves, and in the iSTorth the highest," and he 

 expresses his belief that our bird groups are " as important for study in 

 their geographical distribution as in their taxonomy or their morphol 

 ogy." Professor Parker constantly adduces also instances of the rela- 

 tionship of the birds of the eastern with those of the western side of 

 Notogwa. " If these instances, " he says, " of changed forms in the east- 

 ern Notogiea, corresponding to unchanged (or less changed) types in 

 the western Notoga^a, can be shown to be common, it will go far toward 

 the establishment of a true theory of dispersion and modification of 

 types. If not, if every zoological species has been created, as it is now, 

 fenced in by laws that can not be broken, 'a hedge set about it and 11 

 that it hath,' then I trust, for the sake of true science, that this glam- 

 our will soon be removed from our eyes, and that we shall not be hired 

 on farther after evolutional 'will-O'-the-wisps.'" This bond of organic 

 community must have been by a land area in the southern seas, which 

 with considerable probability occupied the region which I have desig- 

 nated Antarctica. It seems to me that such geological evidence as 

 the occurrence of fossil penguins in the Eocene of both Patagonia and 

 New Zealand, and of marsupials and dinornithine ostriches in the early 

 Tertiaries of South America, of Dinornu and Jjpyornis in New Zea- 

 land and Madagascar, point to the existence of southerji land — doubt- 

 less with elevations and subsidences between — at least from the close 

 of Secondary times. But it is impossible, at least yet, to determine 

 whether the fauna and flora of which remnants exist in the preseut 

 southern continents and islands are the result of the development 

 and dispersal during the genial i^eriod corresponding to the last of tiie 

 northern alternating clusters of glacial and genial j^eriods during the 

 latest high orbital eccentricity, or partly of the first of these or of a 

 combination of both and of similar former vicissitudes. 



It seems established on paleontological evidence that in the Northern 

 Hemisphere, during tlie early part of the Tertiary period, the climate 

 was tropical in the middle of Europe, and that in the Miocene we have 



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Ou ^Egitlioguatlious Birds, Transactions Z. S., VoL X. 



