The Antarctic 



Certain of the New Zealand and South American 

 plants could be reasonably accounted for in this way. 

 This is especially true of the old world conifers such 

 as the genus Araucaria (see p. 281). 



But for most of these antarctics there is not the 

 smallest evidence to show either that they are in any 

 way specially ancient types or that they ever lived 

 farther north than their present habitat. 



One could bring any plant to any position on the 

 earth's surface by such imaginary journeyings as would 

 be involved on such a hypothesis as this. Indeed the 

 necessary route for the Chilian would be right up South 

 and North America across Behring's Straits to its 

 original home, and for the New Zealand cousin by 

 Australia and probably Borneo to Japan or somewhere 

 in Asia. On the whole this seems a very unlikely 

 explanation except for the archaic and antiquated coni- 

 fers or some few of the most primitive and least evolved 

 flowering plants. 



On the second theory, one would explain the simi- 

 larities by supposing that the seeds have been carried 

 by some means or other across the Pacific Ocean. 

 For the distribution of seeds and spores, one might 

 almost say that everything which moves upon the 

 surface of the earth is sometimes utilised to convey 

 the germs of a new vegetation. Icebergs, gales of 

 wind, ocean currents, and migrating birds seem the 

 most probable of the many possible transporters of 

 living seeds. At present, icebergs or drifting ice some- 

 times reaches 50° South latitude, which is not very far 

 from the Australian coast.^ Off the western coast of 

 Fuegia the wind is violent enough to do as much con- 

 veyance of seeds as could reasonably be expected of 

 gales anywhere in the world, and there is a continual 

 succession of westerly storms blowing right round the 

 South Pole at about 50° South latitude. So that seeds 



102 



