C. HEDLEY. 
b 
oO 
CONSIDERATIONS on tote SURVIVING REFUGEES 
AUSTRAL LANDS or ANCIENT ANTARCTIC LIFE. 
By C. HEDLEY, F.L.s., 
Assistant in Zoology to the Australian Museum. 
[Read before the Royal Society of N. S. Wales, August 7, 1895.] 
To ordinary readers the most desolate region imaginable is that 
within the Arctic Circle. Yet the intrepid explorers who have 
furthest penetrated into the northern wilds, encountered there 
bears, wolves, musk oxen, walrus, seals and other mammals, and 
saw flocks of birds steering northwards beyond the utmost limit 
of discovery. 
Infinitely more desolate is the mysterious and pehaps impen 
trable Antarctic Continent or Archipelago. For aught we know, 
here may tower loftier mountains than geographers have marked 
in the Himalayas. From the ship’s deck, voyagers' have descried 
volcanic peaks trending into an interior which extends as a2 
unbroken sheet of ice and snow. Beyond the beach, its whole 
surface hardly now nourishes a single animal or plant. For the — 
lichen reported by Borchgrevink? from Possession Island and Cape 
Adare alone constitutes the recorded terrestrial flora. Envelo 
in an atmosphere of universal death, wrapped in its closely cling: 
ing cerements of ice and snow, the one expression of the Antarctica 
of to-day is that of lifeless silence.? 
But it was once otherwise. Not only may a naturalist assert 
that here stately forests once stood, streams once rippled and 
green fields smiled, but he can picture what trees composed those | 
1 M’Cormick—A sketch of the Antarctic Regions, embracing 4 er 
Remarks, Geographical and Ornithological.—The Tasmanian Jo 
Natural Science, 1., p. 246. 
* The Geographical J ournal, Vol. v., June 1895, p. 583. ee 
* For the best physical and geographical description of Antarctica 
27 e 
Murray—The Geographical Journal, Vol. 11., pp. 1 - 27. 
vise 
