ANTARCTICA: A VANISHED AUSTRAL LAND. 313 



this climate extendiug not only to the limits of the north temperate 

 zone, but a luxuriant temperate tlora flourishing up to nearly 82° of 

 north latitude. It seems diflicult, too, to believe, if we compare all the 

 con/litions now existing at both poles under the present low eccentricity 

 of the orbit, that such a genial climate as just described could have 

 prevailed at so high a latitude, except under the conditions that would 

 necessitate a glacial epoch at its antipodes. So that, if we accept the 

 astronomical theory, we must believe that during the northern Miocene 

 period there was a glacial epoch in the Southern Hemisphere, of which 

 the rock striation and moraines in Africa, the moraines in Australia, 

 Xew Zealand, and South America, may perhaps be the result. That 

 there was at this time a force driving southern and tropical forms to the 

 north is strongly corroborated by the distribiition of the fossil Sirenia 

 (now, and probably always, exclusively confined to the Tropics) of 

 which there are twelve genera and twenty-seven species ranging from 

 the Tropics up to 00° of north latitude in the Eocene and Miocene of 

 Europe, Asia, and Xorth America.^ The remains of southern forms of 

 birds, such as parrots and trogons, not infrequent in the Oligocene and 

 Miocene strata of Euro^ie may not unlikely have been migrants driven 

 from the south before the same impelling force. That there has been 

 such a northward migration is also evidenced by the occurrence of so 

 many plants belonging to New Zealand, Australia, and some of the 

 Antarctic islands isolated on the i^eaks of New Guinea and of Borneo. 

 We must caution the reader, however, against supposing that the 

 southern formations which have been named Eocene and Miocene, etc., 

 are necessarily synchronous with those so named in the Northern 

 Hemisphere. All that can be attirmed is that those systems which con- 

 tain a similarity of succession of their fossils (especially their marine 

 organic remains) are homotaxial — that is, the order in which they 

 appeared on the earth has been similar. 



This much, however, may be accepted as mathematically demon- 

 strated, that, during the glacial epoch of the Northern Hemisphere, 

 while the high eccentricity of the earth's orbit lasted, there was an 

 extremely genial age over the continent, the probability of whose exist- 

 ence we have shown to be high, and that its fauna and flora, of which 

 some examples have been cited, were eventually expelled from their 

 southern i)aradise, on the passing away of the northern glacial epoch, 

 by the slow increase of the southern cold, which has gradually reached 

 to but no farther than its present condition toward glaciation, owing to 

 the decrease of the eccentricity of the orbit and by the extensive sub- 

 sidences of the land, due probably both to the ice accumulation round 

 its pole and to the enormous amount of volcanic disturbance of which 

 the whole region appears to have been the theater. 



Now, as to the explanation of these anomalies of distribution in the 

 Southern Hemisi)here, the arrangement of land which I have outlined 



'Dr. H. Woodward, F. R. S., iu the Geological Magazine, page 423, 1885. 



