MACLOSKIE: CHARACTER AND ORIGIN OF PATAGONIAN FLORA. 959 



is completely sunk at Cape Horn. But that seems not to be the end of 

 the American continent. Differences of sea-soundings, and the South 

 Shetland Isles, suggest its extension onwards towards the south pole ; and 

 finally the transpolar lands with their volcanoes, Erebus and Terror, are 

 still claiming an Andean ancestry. 



The above was in type when we saw Mr. F. W. Hutton's letter on 

 Ancient Antarctica (Nature, July 13, 1905). The recent distribution of 

 both animals and plants proves to him the former existence of an antarc- 

 tic continent connecting South America with New Zealand and with 

 South Africa in the Jurassic period. This sank in the Cretaceous period ; 

 and he believes that there has never since been a land connection between 

 Antarctica and the other continents ; but in Cretaceous and earlier times 

 a Pacific continent connected New Guinea and New Zealand with Chili ; 

 and in Pliocene times a number of islands existed in the Antarctic Ocean, 

 which have since disappeared. Both flora and fauna were formerly richer 

 in that region than now; and a connection is shown between Australia 

 and South America by animal forms like Osteoglossum and Ceratodits, 

 also by Marsupials and South American frogs, none of which have reached 

 New Zealand. The Antarctic islands have a number of birds, fishes and 

 plants in common which could hardly have spread round the world under 

 present conditions of land and water. That this spreading was compara- 

 tively late, is proved to him by near relations between the species. He 

 argues that if there had been continuous land at the time the land ani- 

 mals should have spread along with the marine forms. Most land-plants 

 on the other hand do not require absolute continuity of land to enable 

 them to spread. It may be proper here to refer to Engler's view, cited 

 above (p. 336), "where seeds are carried by birds and over oceans several 

 genera have representatives both in Australia and South America"; and 

 he adds that the facts point to a former tropical, subpolar vegetation. 



Such indications seem to us to speak of a broken chain rather than a 

 continuum of land ; of an archipelago on a great scale, some of its com- 

 ponents of the continental kind as to dimensions ; and with interruptions 

 which secured animal and vegetable isolation ; yet sufficient to permit 

 occasional passage of seeds and of birds, and an occasional transit of a 

 quadruped, a sort of quasi-fuegian archipelago on a larger scale. The 

 fact that the affinity of both Australia and New Zealand with South 

 America is meagre as to its animals, and not at all general as to plants, 



