Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/340

324 Such land areas—perhaps not in all cases positively demonstrated to be distinct from sea ice—are Victoria Land (due south of New Zealand), Wilkes Land (not improbably a series of island elevations opposite Australia, and known under the various names of Adélie Land, Clarie Land, Sabrina Land, etc.), and Graham Land (somewhat east of south of the extremity of South America). The most extended piece of coast or land line is that which has been traced southward in Victoria Land by Ross from about the seventieth to the seventy-ninth parallel of latitude, or over about six hundred geographical miles. It is only here, and in Graham Land (with the adjoining parts of Palmer Land, Louis Philippe Land, Joinville Island, Alexander Land), that our knowledge becomes at all definite.

Ross found the whole eastern coast front of Victoria to be paralleled by one or more mountain ridges of very considerable elevation, and bearing upon themselves a large number of clearly defined volcanic cones. Mount Melbourne, seemingly the highest point (with an elevation of nearly fifteen thousand feet), is described as having a prodigious summit crater. Mount Erebus (12,400 feet), the most southerly of all active volcanoes, was in violent eruption at the time of Ross's visit (January, 1841); a little to the east of it (in approximately latitude 78° 30′ south) is the extinct cone of "Terror," 10,900 feet. Beyond Mount Terror the Parry Mountains, also of very considerable elevation, and which continue to be the most southerly piece of land area that has ever been sighted, follow the generally southern trend to at least the seventy-ninth parallel of latitude, and not impossibly for a long piece beyond.

Geographers who define the contours of the presumed antarctic continent usually deflect its course eastward beyond Mount Terror so as to make it conform to the east-and-west ice barrier which barred Ross's passage farther southward; but it is significant that Ross says, "If there be land to the southward [of the barrier], it must be very remote, or of much less elevation than any other part of the coast we have seen, or it would have appeared above the barrier." This statement becomes of special importance, because elsewhere the land was clearly defined by its mountains at distances of ninety, one hundred and thirty, and even one hundred and fifty miles.

The region explored by Ross has only once been visited since—by Kristensen and Borchgrevink and their associates of the Antarctic. The Antarctic succeeded in following the route of Ross to about the seventy-fourth parallel of latitude, when, with open water still to the south, a return was made, owing to an absence of whale supply. Few facts of any consequence were added by this journey, the most important being, perhaps, the discovery