POSITION AND LIMITS. 5 



the name of Victoria Land. The region connected with 

 this far away to the south is known as the Great Ice 

 Barrier, and the open bay of the Pacific between the 

 barrier and Victoria Land is known as Ross' Sea. 



Thus all the countries, or rather all the coasts, have 

 been named which human discovery has up to the 

 present brought to our knowledge of the Antarctic. As 

 to the probability that renewed explorations will dis- 

 cover more and that all the parts named will be found 

 to belong to one and the same south polar continent, 

 or whether they are merely scattered island groups, 

 these points will be discussed at the close of this work. 

 In the present state of our knowledge, it would evidently 

 be presumptuous to undertake the calculation of the 

 area of the Antarctic land-surface. Taking the equal 

 division of land and water in the hitherto unexplored 

 area of the south polar regions for granted — a mere 

 conjecture — Hermann Wagner gives 3,500,000 square 

 miles as the extent of the land in the Antarctic regions, 

 an area therefore equal to that of the continent of 

 Australia with Oceana. 



