276 THE ANTARCTIC MANUAL. 
XIX. 
ZOOLOGY: 
KERGUELEN ISLAND: AN INTRODUCTION TO 
ANTARCTIC ZOOLOGY. 
By Prorsessor D’Arcy WENTWoRTH THOMPSON, C.B. 
THE present moment is inopportune for the writing of a fresh account 
of the fauna of the Southern Ocean. The rich results of the Valdivia 
and Belgica remain unpublished, or have been described only in a brief 
and fragmentary way, and we are accordingly thrown back on older 
records, and facts that have been more or less familiar to us, knowing 
all the while that material is already in hand for a great extension of 
our knowledge. I have confined myself, in the following article, to an 
account of the Kerguelen area, for which the Challenger expedition and 
the British, American and German Transit of Venus expeditions brought 
home a copious fauna. This Kerguelen fauna is not strictly speaking 
an Antarctic, but only a sub-Antarctic one, and such first-fruits as we 
have of the new knowledge now begin to teach us that the Antarctic 
Ocean contains other faunistic elements unrepresented in the latitude 
of Kerguelen; but so little of this new knowledge is yet available 
that I have perforce contined myself within the aforesaid limits. 
Kerguelen forms the lofty crest, and its neighbour, Heard Island, 
the less elevated spur, of a plateau which rises to a depth of 100 to 
150 fathoms out of the deep waters of the ocean; the latter, to the 
south and west, is about 1500 fathoms deep, somewhat deeper, 
towards 2000 fathoms, to the eastward, and descends north of the 
islands of St. Paul and Amsterdam into the still greater depths of 
the Indian Ocean.* 
* The following description of the Kerguelen coast is mainly drawn from Studer’s 
excellent account iu ‘ Die Forschunysreise 8.M.S. Gazelle,’ part iii. 1889; the zoological 
account is compiled from Studer, from the Challenger Reports, the Reports of the 
British and American Transit of Venus expeditions, and other sources. A general list 
of the Antarctic and sub-Antarctic fauna is given by Pfeffer in the ‘ Ergebnisse der 
Deutschen Polar-Expeditionen,’ Allgem. Theil, Bd. ii. 17. The reader is also referred 
tu Sir John Murray’s claborate paper on the connection between the Antarctic and 
Arctic faunas in the Trans. R. Soc, Edin. 
