Page:A Voyage of Discovery and Research in the Southern and Antarctic Regions Vol 1.djvu/157

] "Though Kerguelen Island is situated in comparatively a low latitude, the vegetation is decidedly antarctic both because the majority of its native plants are peculiarly abundant in the same or higher parallels of the southern hemisphere, and from the mass of its vegetation being composed of comparatively few species.

"At a little distance, the island presents the appearance of absolute sterility, and when the voyager draws nearer the land, the scenery scarcely improves. A narrow belt of green grass runs along the quiet shores of the harbour, mixed with, and succeeded by, large rounded masses of a dirty green or rusty brown colour, due to the predominance of a curious umbelliferous plant, allied to the Bolax, or "Balsam Bog" of the Falkland Islands. Higher on the hills vegetation only exists in scattered tufts, the plants being the same as inhabit a loiver level, and it almost ceases at an elevation of 1000–1200 feet.

"Even the description given in Captain Cook's voyage falls short of the cheerless truth, when, quoting Mr. Anderson's journal, he says, 'Perhaps no place hitherto discovered in either hemisphere, under the same parallel of latitude, affords so scanty a field for the naturalist as this barren spot;' for he might assuredly have added ten degrees to its own latitude in southern regions, and upwards of twenty in the north, as the limits upon which such a paucity of species exists; for even in Spitzbergen