Henry O. Forbes—Chatham Isles and the Antarctic Lands. 231 
and Cunoniee, with eighteen genera), are confined (almost) to New 
Caledonia, Australia, Tasmania, New Zealand, the Mascarene Islands, 
South Africa, and South America. Of their thirty-five genera two 
only cross the equator into the northern hemisphere. Of the 
Proteacee, composed of forty-nine genera and nine hundred and 
fifty species, only twenty-five species cross the Equator, otherwise 
they are distributed to all the southern continents with Madagascar, 
Tasmania, New Zealand, and New Caledonia; but they occur in 
Miocene and Cretaceous strata in Europe. 
Mr. Forbes, after discussing the opinions of Wallace, Darwin, and 
Blanford for and against an extensive land area in the Antarctic 
Ocean, remarks :—In considering the number of genera, or species 
of the same groups that have reached the three terminal regions of 
the land in the southern hemisphere, it seems almost too remarkable 
to believe that it should have been the same forms in more than one 
that have alone been able to survive the vicissitudes of retreat 
against ‘the pressure of more specialised types’ through such 
different lands from the north to the south, without leaving often a 
single representative north of the equator and yet should have 
succeeded in resisting being driven right into the southern sea. It 
is besides a biological axiom that two identical species have never 
independently arisen in distant localities. 
The Author of the paper then proceeded to adduce the evidence 
brought forward by Huxley in regard to the distribution of the 
Peristeropodes (of the Gallinacez), and of the Parrots, and that by 
Prof. W. K. Parker, our most penetrating embryologist, and the 
foremost of the interpreters of those passing structures in the 
embryo, which appearing but for an hour, and vanishing as if they 
had never been, yet so surely proclaim its pedigree and inheritances, 
in his paper on the Aigithognathous birds, in which are described 
the affinities between (among other groups) the Australian Gymno- 
rhinde and the South American Dendrocolaptide—groups unknown 
north of the equator. 
This evidence, he considers, of the weightiest kind in support 
of the hypothesis that there existed a large land extension round the 
South Pole joining South America and Australia, and approaching 
to, or intermittently only connected with, South Africa, possessing 
a genial climate, on which the progenitors of these groups common 
to Australia and South America, which have now lost their nearest 
relations, could multiply, became modified, and eventually migrated 
northward on the return of colder epochs, or on account of the 
subsidence of the land. 
Before considering how far the presence of such an austral con- 
tinent would explain the distribution of life, Mr. Forbes referred to 
the climate of the southern hemisphere during the later geological 
periods. He referred to the evidences of glaciation in South Africa, 
in South America, in Australia, and in New Zealand, dating from a 
comparatively recent epoch. Mr. Forbes accepted Sir Robert Ball’s 
emphatic declaration: ‘It isan essential doctrine of the astronomical 
theory of the ice age that the respective glaciations of the two 
