316 ANTARCTICA: A VANISHED AUSTRAL LAND. 



It is not necessary to suppose — and, moreover, it is very improbable — 

 that all these continental southernly peninsulas were contemi)ora- 

 ueously connected with Antarctica. It is impossible otherwise to 

 account for the presence, for instance, of the same South American 

 forms in Australia and their absence in New Zealand; for Mascarene 

 forms in the New Zealand rejjjion and not in Australia or Africa or 

 elsewhere. So long as we are unacquainted with the orography of the 

 submerged southern continent, with its mountain and river barriers, 

 and the order of tlie making and breaking of its various commissures, 

 we can hardly hope to account satisfactorily for all the anomalies of the 

 southern distribution, none of which, however, are inexplicable when 

 the inevitable elevations and subsidences due to the vast "physical dis- 

 turbances, of which we have abundant evidence all over the region, are 

 considered. 



Shortly, therefore, it is highly probable that an extensive continent 

 existed in the Southern Hemisphere, on which many forms of terrestrial 

 life originated and had there the original center of their development 

 and dispersal; that Professor Huxley's division of the globe, according 

 to the distribution of its life, into a northern and into a southern land 

 must be accepted as its two primary biological divisions, from whose 

 centers of development at both poles the wanderings of the fauna and 

 flora were regulated by cold and warm jjeriods and by the elevation 

 and flooding of one part of the continental plateau after another, and 

 that from their advances and retreats across the ecpiator and their jour- 

 neyings from east to west, according to the geographical features of 

 the region and its meteorological conditions, on which their existence 

 depends, resulted tlie present wonderful distribution of life on the 

 globe which forii^s so fascinating a study to all who commence it. 



