Page:Polar Exploration - Bruce - 1911.djvu/131

Rh region, as well as by the researches of Dr. Pirie of the Scotia, the naturalists of the Discovery and of Sir Ernest Shackleton's recent expedition, that at one time, certainly in Jurassic times, there must have been a temperate if not a subtropical climate over Antarctica. Therefore, if there happened to be land connection with Antarctica at even as late a date as I have, for the sake of argument, supposed—and there is so far no evidence that there was—it would have been possible, under those conditions of climate, for marsupials to exist. But with the changed conditions of climate it does not seem likely that they or their descendants could possibly survive. It is therefore not surprising that there should be no mammals in Antarctic lands, though they are abundant in the Arctic, where there are even now plentiful connections with lands largely occupied by mammals of almost every description.

But if the Antarctic lands are desolate of mammals it is not so with the Antarctic seas. As in Arctic seas, whales and seals abound in enormous numbers, except where they have been annihilated by man. Of the whales very little is known. Ross described a whale "greatly resembling, but said to be distinct from, the Greenland whale." But so far no such whale has been seen by other explorers or whalers within the limit of the pack ice,