FOR THE SOUTH LAND 
49 
science not to be struck by the low latitude to which 
Antarctic ice penetrated northward, and he assigned as a 
reason for it the fact that the Antarctic summer occurred 
when the Earth was in the part of its elliptical orbit most 
remote from the sun and when its motion in the orbit 
is consequently slowest, so that the winter is not only 
colder, but eight days longer than that of the northern 
hemisphere. He also made the very practical remark 
that if Bouvet had had experience of the arctic regions 
and the methods of ice-navigation there he might have 
been more successful. 
Buffon also dealt at some length with the unknown 
South in his essay on the Theory of the Earth where he 
expressed views as to the existence of a great continent 
which subsequent discoveries led him to modify. He 
seemed somewhat credulous in accepting the stories of 
“ people worthy of belief 99 who had told him of an 
English captain named Monson who had reached 88° S. 
without seeing ice, and of some unnamed Dutchmen who 
claimed to have reached 89° S., or within 70 miles of 
the pole. One cannot help thinking of the Dutch sailor 
who boasted to his boon-companions in a sea-port tavern 
that he had once sailed so far north that he came two 
degrees beyond the pole, though we would not for a 
moment compare Buffon with the simple-minded pam- 
phleteer who placed the vaunt on record as a fact. 
Buache, the eminent geographer who will be remem- 
bered as the first to use contour lines on maps for ex- 
pressing differences of level, read a paper to the Acad- 
emy of Sciences in 1757 in which he suggested the 
existence of a great Antarctic Sea nearly surrounded 
by land, but with two openings whence vast quantities 
of ice from the rivers of that continent were discharged 
4 
