1834.] ANTARCTIC ISLANDS. 207 



vegetation. Georgia, an island 96 miles long and 10 broad, in the 

 latitude of Yorkshire, "in the very height of summer, is in a man- 

 ner wholly covered with frozen snow." It can boast only of moss, 

 some tufts of grass, and wild burnet; it has only one land-bird 

 (Anthus correndera), yet Iceland, which is 10 nearer the pole, has, 

 according to Mackenzie, fifteen laud-birds. The South Shetland 

 Islands, in the same latitude as the southern half of Norway, 

 possess only some lichens, moss, and a little grass; and Lieut. 

 Kendall * found the bay, in which he was at anchor, beginning to 

 freeze at a period corresponding with our 8th of September. The 

 soil here consists of ice and volcanic ashes interstratified ; and at a 

 little depth beneath the surface it must remain perpetually con- 

 gealed, for Lieut. Kendall found the body of a foreign sailor which 

 had long been buried, with the flesh and all the features perfectly 

 preserved. It is a singular fact, that on the two great continents 

 in the northern hemisphere (but not in the broken land of Europe 

 between them), we have the zone of perpetually frozen under-soil 

 in a low latitude namely, in 56 in North America at the depth of 

 three feet,f and in G2 in Siberia at the depth of twelve to fifteen 

 feet as the result of a directly opposite condition of things to 

 those of the southern hemisphere. On the northern continents, 

 the winter is rendered excessively cold by the radiation from a 

 large area of land into a clear sky, nor is it moderated by the 

 warmth-bringing currents of the sea; the short summer, on the 

 other hand, is hot. In the Southern Ocean the winter is not so 

 excessively cold, but the summer is far less hot, for the clouded sky 

 seldom allows the sun to warm the ocean, itself a bad absorbent of 

 heat ; and hence the mean temperature of the year, which regulates 

 the zone of perpetually congealed under-soil, is low. It is evident 

 that a rank vegetation, which does not so much require heat as 

 it does protection from intense cold, would approach much nearer 

 to this zone of perpetual congelation under the equable climate of 

 the southern hemisphere, than tinder the extreme climate of the 

 northern continents. 



The case of the sailor's body perfectly preserved in the icy soil 

 of the South Shetland Islands (lat. 62 to 63 S.), in a rather lower 

 latitude than that (lat. 64 N.) under which Pallas found the 



* Geographical Journal, 1830, pp. Go, 66. 



f Richardson's Append, to Back's Exped,, and Humboldt's Fragm. 

 Asiat., torn. ii. p. 386. 



