XI 
HEIGHT OF SNOW-LITE 
259 
ledonous plants ; large and elegant ferns are numerous, and 
arborescent grasses entwine the trees into one entangled mass 
to the height of thirty or forty feet above the ground. Palm- 
trees grow in lat. 3 7 0 ; an arborescent grass, very like a 
bamboo, in 40° ; and another closely allied kind, of great 
length, but not erect, flourishes even as far south as 45° S. 
An equable climate, evidently due to the large area of sea 
compared with the land, seems to extend over the greater part 
of the southern hemisphere ; and as a consequence, the vegeta¬ 
tion partakes of a semi-tropical character. Tree-ferns thrive 
luxuriantly in Van Diemen’s Land (lat. 45°), and I measured 
one trunk no less than six feet in circumference. An arbor¬ 
escent fern was found by Forster in New Zealand in 46°, where 
orchideous plants are parasitical on the trees. In the Auckland 
Islands, ferns, according to Dr. Dieffenbach, 1 have trunks so 
thick and high that they may be almost called tree-ferns ; and 
in these islands, and even as far south as lat. 55 0 in the 
Macquarrie Islands, parrots abound. 
On the Height of the Snow-line , and on the Descent of the 
Glaciers , in South America. —For the detailed authorities for 
the following table, I must refer to the former edition :— 
Latitude. 
Equatorial region ; mean result 
Bolivia, lat. 16 0 to 18° S. . . 
Central Chile, lat. 33° S. . 
Chiloe, lat. 41 0 to 43 0 S. . . 
Tierra del Fuego, 54° S. . 
Height in feet 
of Snow-line. 
15,748 
17,000 
14,500 to 15,000 
6000 
3500 to 4000 
Observer. 
Humboldt. 
Pentland. 
Gillies, and the Author. 
Officers of the Beagle , 
and the Author. 
King. 
As the height of the plane of perpetual snow seems chiefly to 
be determined by the extreme heat of the summer, rather than 
by the mean temperature of the year, we ought not to be 
surprised at its descent in the Strait of Magellan, where the 
summer is so cool, to only 3500 or 4000 feet above the level 
of the sea ; although in Norway, we must travel to between 
lat. 67° and 70° N., that is, about 14 0 nearer the pole, to meet 
with perpetual snow at this low level. The difference in 
height, namely about 9000 feet, between the snow-line on the 
Cordillera behind Chiloe (with its highest points ranging from 
1 See the German Translation of this Journal: and for the other facts Mr. 
Brown’s Appendix to Flinders’s Voyage. 
