The Antarctic 
Certain of the New Zealand and South American 
plants could be reasonably accounted for in this way. 
This is especially true of the old world conifers such 
as the genus Araucaria (see p. 281). 
But for most of these antarctics there is not the 
smallest evidence to show either that they are in any 
way specially ancient types or that they ever lived 
farther north than their present habitat. 
One could bring any plant to any position on the 
earth’s surface by such imaginary journeyings as would 
be involved on such a hypothesis as this. Indeed the 
necessary route for the Chilian would be right up South 
and North America across Behring’s Straits to its 
original home, and for the New Zealand cousin by 
Australia and probably Borneo to Japan or somewhere 
in Asia. On the whole this seems a very unlikely 
explanation except for the archaic and antiquated coni- 
fers or some few of the most primitive and least evolved 
flowering plants. 
On the second theory, one would explain the simi- 
larities by supposing that the seeds have been carried 
by some means or other across the Pacific Ocean. 
For the distribution of seeds and spores, one might 
almost say that everything which moves upon the 
surface of the earth is sometimes utilised to convey 
the germs of a new vegetation. Icebergs, gales of 
wind, ocean currents, and migrating birds seem the 
most probable of the many possible transporters of~ 
living seeds. At present, icebergs or drifting ice some- 
times reaches 50° South latitude, which is not very far 
from the Australian coast.2 Off the western coast of 
Fuegia the wind is violent enough to do as much con- 
veyance of seeds as could reasonably be expected of 
gales anywhere in the world, and there is a continual 
succession of westerly storms blowing right round the 
South Pole at about 50° South latitude. So that seeds 
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