1834.] THE ANTARCTIC ISLANDS. 249 
interstratified; and at a little depth beneath the surface it must 
remain perpetually congealed, for Lieut. Kendall found the body 
of a foreign sailor which had long been buried, with the flesh 
and all the features perfectly preserved. It is a singular fact, 
that on the two great continents in the northern hemisphere, 
(but not in the broken Jand of Europe between them), we have the 
zone of perpetually frozen under-soil in a low latitude—namely, 
in 56° in North America at the depth of three feet,* and in 
62° in Siberia at the depth of twelve te fifteen feet—as the result 
of a directly opposite condition of things, to those of the southern 
hemisphere. On the northern continents, the winter is rendered 
excessively cold by the radiation from a large area of land into 
a clear sky, nor is it moderated by the warmth-bringing currents 
of the sea; the short summer, on the other hand, is hot. In the 
Southern Ocean the winter is not so excessively cold, but the 
summer is far less hot, for the clouded sky seldom allows the sun 
to warm the ocean, itself a bad absorbent of heat ; and hence the 
mean temperature of the year, which regulates the zone of per- 
petually congealed under-soil, is low. It is evident that a rank 
vegetation, whieh does not so much require heat as it does pro-, 
tection from intense cold, would approach much nearer to this 
zone of perpetual congelation under the equable climate of the’ 
southern hemisphere, than under the extreme climate of the 
northern continents. 
The case of the sailor’s body perfectly preserved in the icy soil 
of the South Shetland Islands (lat. 62° to 63° S.), in a rather lower 
latitude than that (lat. 64° N.) under which Pallas found the 
frozen rhinoceros in Siberia, is very interesting. Although it is 
a fallacy, as I have endeavoured to show in a former chapter, to 
suppose that the larger quadrupeds require a luxuriant vege- 
tation for their support, nevertheless it is important to find in 
the South Shetland Islands, a frozen under-soil within 360 miles 
of the forest-clad islands near Cape Horn, where, as far as the 
bulk of vegetation is concerned, any number of great quadrupeds 
might be supported. ‘he perfect preservation of the carcasses 
of the Siberian elephants and rhinoceroses is certainly one of the 
most wonderful facts in geology; but independently of ‘the 
* Richardson's Append. to Back’s Exped , and Humboldt’s Fragm. Asiat., 
tom. ii. p. 386. 
