78 DISCUSSIONS IN CLIMATOLOGY. 



I have been informed by Capt. Sir Frederick J. O. 

 Evans, Hydrographer of the Admiralty, that, in the 

 compilation of his most instructive and useful Ice 

 Chart of the South Polar regions, he was struck with 

 the remarkable character of the ice foreshores of all 

 the parts of the Antarctic continent sighted by 

 voyagers, and of the undoubted occasional disruption 

 of hundreds or more miles of foreshore ice. The 

 ice, he believes, is evidently formed on compara- 

 tively low and level land, and is thrust out in a 

 continuous sheet into deep water, where it breaks up 

 into bergs. 



Assuming then, what seems thus probable, that the 

 Antarctic regions consists of low discontinuous land, 

 it will help to explain, as will be shown in a future 

 chapter, the disappearance of the ice during the warm 

 interglacial periods of the southern hemisphere. 



On the Argument against the Existence of a South- 

 Polar Ice-cap. — We have certainly no evidence that, 

 during even the severest part of the glacial epoch, an 

 ice-cap, like that advocated by Agassiz and other ex- 

 treme glacialists, ever existed at the North Pole ; I am, 

 however, unable to admit with Mr. Alfred E. Wallace 

 that some such cap, though of smaller dimensions, does 

 not at present exist at the South Pole. Speaking of 

 the Antarctic ice-cap, Mr. Wallace says : — "A similar 

 ice-cap is, however, believed to exist on the Antarctic 

 Pole at the present day. We have, however, shown 

 that the production of any such ice-cap is improbable, 

 if not impossible ; because snow and ice can only 

 accumulate where precipitation is greater than melting 

 and evaporation, and this is never the case except in 

 areas exposed to the full influence of the vapour-bearing 

 winds. The outer rim of the ice-sheet would inevitably 

 exhaust the air of so much of its moisture, that what 



