ANTARCTIC ADVENTURE AND RESEARCH 



Turning now to fields of natural science, there is 

 much of vital interest which can only be elucidated in 

 Antarctica. Many of the problems in southern zoology 

 turn on the paths followed by animals in the past in 

 reaching the three southern continents. Broadly speak- 

 ing, there are two schools of thought. One believes 

 that all the vertebrates reached the southern continents 

 by migration from the more extensive lands to the 

 north, in most cases from Eurasia. The other school 

 believes that Antarctica served as a sort of ''half-way 

 house" whence animals could spread by vanished 

 *'land-bridges" to South America, to South Africa, to 

 Australia, and to New Zealand. To quote R. C. 

 Murphy, ''The real proof would be forthcoming only 

 through the discovery of marsupials or other pertinent 

 material in fossiliferous beds of Antarctica." We shall 

 see that wonderful fossils, both of plants and animals, 

 have been discovered in South Victoria Land and in 

 Graham Land, which also throw a flood of light on the 

 fascinating problem of past climates. 



As regards plants, there are so few in the Antarctic 

 that the botanical problems are not so interesting as 

 those of zoology. No flowering plants occur there, 

 but it is very curious that half the Antarctic lichens and 

 thirty per cent of the mosses occur also in the Arctic 

 regions and have not yet been found in the low latitudes 

 between. 



It is generally known that the regions now inhabited 

 by the most progressive peoples were covered with a 

 series of enormous ice fields in the last (Pleistocene) 

 epoch. This occurred many thousand years ago, but 



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