SURVIVING REFUGEES OF ANCIENT ANTARCTIC LIFE. 281 
The sole supports of the theoretical transpacific bridge are the 
difficulties it is believed to explain. A biologist might object, 
that had such a bridge existed, New Zealand being at the furthest 
extremity, ought to contain fewer South American affinities than 
do intermediate Polynesian islands, like Samoa or Tahiti, lying 
nearer to the source. On the contrary, these islands are devoid 
of such. Anda geologist might say that this supposed bridge was 
discordant with the main orographic structure of the region. Its 
relics are detected by Prof. Hutton in an abyssal area two 
thousand fathoms deep, which only in strained language can be 
termed a “plateau.” Of where he supposes that it lay, Geikie! 
writes, “so abruptly does the continental plateau rise from the 
ocean trough, that a depression of the sea level, or an elevation of 
the plateau for ten thousand feet would add only a narrow belt 
to the Pacific coast between Alaska and Cape Horn.” Much of 
the biological and geological data, on which Prof. Hutton’s paper 
was based, have since been refuted or withdrawn. 
Another answer to the question at issue is tendered by Dr. 
H. O. Forbes.2 After a lucid summary of the kinship of austral life 
observed by earlier naturalists, and of facts collected by himself 
in the Chatham Islands, he constructs an immense hypothetical 
Antarctic Continent to explain these problems. 
The impression left on my mind by acareful study of this paper 
% that a foundation so slender is insufficient to bear a super- 
structure So vast. No geological era is assigned for the map of 
Ancient Antarctica accompanying the article. To this area the 
Mascarene Islands appear to be attached chiefly upon the strength 
of an extinct bird of dubious lineage. The difficulties of the 
change from the climate of primeval Antarctica and the change 
in the depth of circumpolar seas are not explained, or indeed the 
changes Proved. The Antarctic fauna and flora, so far as surviving 
sments allow us to reconstruct them, do not suggest that wealth 
1 Address Geo 
* The C 
Vol. ur, 
graph. Sect. British Association, 1892, p. 796. 
hatham Islands, their relation to a former southern continent, 
“ Supplementary Papers, Royal Geographical Society, 1893. 
