president’s address. 
435 
coniferous wood, and fossil shells of Cucullcea, Cythereea, Cyprina, 
Teredo, and Naticie, having a close resemblance to species of lower 
Tertiary age in Patagonia, &c. These fossil remains indicate a much 
warmer climate in these areas in times past. 
It is not to be expected that a living land-fauna will now be 
discovered beyond the Penguin rookeries. Fossils will, however, 
throw important light upon the age of the Antarctic land. 
As Tertiary, Mesozoic, and Palaeozoic Fossils have been freely 
met with in Arctic regions, we are justified in anticipating the 
discovery of like forms on the Antarctic lands, with corresponding 
former climatic changes, such as the presence of these forms of life 
would demand.* 
Kerguelen Islands, Lat. 49°20 / S. Long. 69°24'E. 
In Sir James Clark Ross’s voyage to the Antarctic (1847, 2 vols. 
Murray), ho visited the Island of Kerguelen in 1840, and records 
the occurrence of a bed of Coal, four feet thick and forty feet in 
length (exposed), near Arched Point, Christmas Harbour, thirty feet 
above tho sea, and covered by basalt. On the north side of the 
bay formed by Cape Francois, is a thin seam of coal (two or three 
inches in thickness) covered by a kind of “slag” and by basalt. 
Silicified trunks of trees are also met with, some of which (brought 
home by Sir Joseph Hooker) are preserved in the British Museum. 
The coal is described as slaty, of a brownish-black colour, and 
the fracture is like wood-coal. Both the wood and the coal-seam 
are probably of Tertiary age. (A trunk of a large tree, seven feet 
in circumference, and much silicified, was dug out of soil below the 
basalt.) The wood, which for the most part is highly silicified, is 
found enclosed in the basalt, whilst the coal crops out in ravines, 
in close contact with the overlying porphyritic and amygdaloidal 
greenstone. 
Ross mentions another bed of coal in Cumberland Bay, one foot 
in thickness (light and friable with a black glossy fracture like 
cannel coal, which does not soil the fingers). It is covered by a 
porphyritic amygdaloidal and greenstone rock. Another bed of coal 
* See Sir John Murray : Proe. Roy. Soc., 1898, vol. lxii. pp. 424 — 451. 
