46 Evidences of a Glacial Epoch from Kerguelen's Land, 



been weathered down into so many rugged outliers before 

 the last series of lava outflows had commenced to flow. The 

 sea cliffs, being everywhere built up of hard and soft layers, 

 have weathered into a series of well-marked ledges, which 

 ascend from the beach to the mountain tops in natural stair- 

 cases. 



The island is situated in the path of the wet westerly 

 winds which blow strongly and with few interrup- 

 tions. 



The higher range is also the weather range, and its crests 

 intercept the low-travelling clouds. These snow-capped 

 heights wring from the passing winds their moisture, which 

 is deposited, at the greater altitudes, in snow, and at the 

 lesser in sleet and rain, and the winds then pass on to the 

 lower hills at the eastern and leeward end of the islands, 

 diminished in force and in a comparatively dry and cloudless 

 condition, and in descending they may become relatively 

 warm. In consequence of these circumstances the leeward 

 range, although 3000 feet in mean altitude, is always free 

 from snow in summer; while the weather range, with a 

 mean altitude only 400 feet higher, is covered with perpetual 

 snow, which unloads itself down the valleys in great glaciers. 

 These latter do not anywhere reach the coast, and their 

 terminal faces are but rarely even visible from the sea-shore, 

 owing to the thickness of the atmosphere in their vicinity, 

 and to their distance inland. 



The interesting feature in relation to these glaciers, and 

 the one to which I desire more particularly to call your 

 attention, is that, whereas they are to-day confined to the 

 higher valleys of the higher range, there are abundant and 

 indisputable* evidences that the whole island down to, and 

 even below, the sea-level, was buried under ice at a com- 

 paratively recent period. The furrows of glaciers are seen 

 wherever the island has been explored. The lower hill-tops, 

 still bare and barren, have been cut down by travelling ice, 

 which has planed them smooth exposing clean-cut, hori- 

 zontal sections of the geodes of the amygdaloidal rocks. 

 Each shelf of the basalt stairs has its strise, and the lower 

 valleys are scratched and scraped and smoothed by glaciers 

 which have since disappeared. "I* Every harbour is an ice- 

 cut fiord. Royal Sound has its entrance barred by a sill but 

 15 fathoms deep, whereas its floor falls within until, near to 



* Challenger Reports, p. 348. f Challenger, p. 356. 



