Greenland and the Antarctic Continent. 357 
might perhaps induce fresh lines of stratification; but neither 
motion nor pressure could have selected broken blue bands 
from among the white and placed them in their old positions. 
Why the icebergs from Greenland are not of the tabular 
form and stratified like those of the Antarctic regions, is 
doubtless owing to the fact that the Greenland ice is dis- 
charged through narrow fjords, which completely destroy the 
original horizontal stratifications. 
Let us now see the consequence to which the foregoing 
considerations all lead. The tabular form and flat-topped 
character of the icebergs, with their perfectly horizontal bed- 
ding, show that they have been formed on a flat and even 
surface. They show also that this flat surface is not a mere 
local affair, but that it must be the general character of ihe 
Antarctic land ; for all, or nearly all, of the bergs are of this 
tabular form. Again, the unaltered character of the stratifi- 
cations of the bergs shows that there can be no great moun- 
tain-ranges, or even much rough and uneven ground in the 
interior; for if there were, the bergs in their passage outwards 
would have had to pass over it ; and this they could not have 
done and still have retained, as they actually have, their hori- 
zontal stratifications undisturbed. These icebergs, as we have 
seen, must have traversed in their outward motion, before 
being disconnected with the ice-sheet, a distance of hundreds 
of miles ; yet none of them bear the marks of having passed 
down or across a valley or even over roches moutonnies. 
That the Antarctic continent has a flat and even surface, the 
character of the icebergs shows beyond dispute. But this, it 
will be urged, does not prove that this surface may not be 
greatly elevated ; in other words, that it may not be a flat 
elevated plateau. This, of course, is true ; but it is evidently 
far more likely that this region, nearly 3000 miles across, 
should consist of flat dismembered land, or groups of low 
islands separated and surrounded by shallow seas, than that it 
should consist of a lofty plateau without either hills, valleys, 
or mountain-ridges. In this case it may be that the greater 
part of the Antarctic ice-cap rests on land actually below sea- 
level — viz. on the floor of the shallow seas surrounding those 
island-groups. We know that such a condition of things 
was actually the case in regard to the great ice-sheet of North- 
western Europe during the glacial epoch. A glance at the 
Chart of the path of the ice given in ' Climate and Time,' 
p. 448 (which since its publication has been proved to be cor- 
rect in almost every particular), will show that the larger portion 
of the sheet rested on the bed of the Baltic, German Ocean, 
and the seas around Great Britain and Ireland and the Orkney 
