Searles Y. Wood, Jun. — The Climate Controversy. 443 



are agreed. It was the view, however, of Sir Charles, that these 

 conditions were of themselves alone adequate to account for all 

 changes of climate which the earth has undergone, though in his 

 latest editions of the " Principles of Geology " he admitted that 

 other causes have probably contributed. In this work he gave 

 imaginary representations of such a distribution of land and water 

 over the globe as, in his view, would produce the extreme of heat 

 and the extreme of cold. In that intended to represent the extreme 

 of heat, the land is all collected in low latitudes on either side of 

 the Equator, so that the higher latitudes and polar regions are 

 occupied entirely by the ocean ; while in that intended to represent 

 the extreme of cold, these conditions are reversed. Mr. Croll, how- 

 ever, in his late work on " Climate," contends that precisely opposite 

 results to those supposed by Sir Charles would flow from such arrange- 

 ments of land and water, since the occupation of the equatorial 

 belt by land would prevent the formation there of those great 

 currents of warm water, which, by transferring heat from the lower 

 latitudes to the higher, and to the polar region, mitigate greatly the 

 normal cold of those parts of the earth. 



The preponderance of glacial conditions in the present Antarctic 

 regions over those in the Arctic was attributed by Sir Charles to the 

 accumulation of land, and particularly of high land, within the Ant- 

 arctic circle. The glimpses obtained by Sir James C. Boss's expe- 

 dition of the mountains cutting the distant horizon behind the 

 perpendicular ice-wall, which was found by that expedition to 

 extend for hundreds of miles in very deep water, lead to the belief 

 that some of the Antarctic land which lies beneath the vast mass of 

 ice, whose seaward termination forms this wall, must rise to great 

 altitudes ; while the two great volcanos discovered by that expedi- 

 tion in the same region, by their great altitude, point to the same 

 inference. In the Arctic region the only lofty land which has been 

 discovered, notwithstanding that much of this region has been pene- 

 trated in various directions, while the Antarctic has remained 

 impenetrable, is that of Spitzbergen ; ^ the influence of which is so 

 greatly modified by the impact of the Gulf-stream on its western 

 coasts, that Spitzbergen, though covered with great glaciers, is not 

 completely sheeted with ice like Greenland, which lies in lower 

 latitude by several degrees ; and there is every reason to suppose 

 that the elevation of Greenland beneath its icy mantle is, even in its 

 interior, far below that of Spitzbergen. Besides this, the Antarctic 

 region does not appear to be penetrated by any great current carry- 

 ing warm water from the tropics, as is the Arctic ; and the great 

 ice-sheet which surrounds the Antarctic Pole, stretching far beyond 

 the limits of the land, has its terminal wall in very deep water, appa- 

 rently on all sides around the Pole. The drift of the bergs which break 

 off from this wall is thus, though slow, unchecked by shoalness of 

 water (by which the greater part of the Arctic bergs are arrested 

 until they waste away), or diverted by the incidence of a powerful 



1 Possibly the lately-discovered Franz Joseph Land may also prove to be part of 

 some Arctic highland. 



