Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/346

330 plain and continuous, and over the greater part of it, in clear weather, the great dome of receding ice-cap is well visible. And yet from this ice accumulation hundreds of glaciers are given off whose terminal or sea walls are of much the same height as the greater part of the Antarctic Barrier. Naturally, it can he assumed that Antarctica is much less mountainous than Greenland—may, in fact, be a gently rising or almost flat plain—and that the great length of its glaciers, which marks off a termination possibly a hundred miles or more distant from the actual border of the land, is that which prevents the land contours themselves from being seen. But are there just grounds for a contention of this kind?

The distinctiveness of the antarctic climate as compared with the arctic is found in the relations of both the summer and the winter temperatures. The high summer heat of the north, which in the few months of its existence has the energy to develop that lovely carpeting of grass and flowers which gives to the low-lying lands even to the eighty-second parallel of latitude a charm equal to that of the upland meadows of Switzerland, is in a measure wanting in the south; in its place frequent cold and dreary fogs navigate the atmosphere, and render dreary and desolate a region that extends far into what may be properly designated the habitable zone. The fields of poppies, anemones, saxifrages, and mountain pinks, of dwarf birches and willows, are replaced by interminable snow and ice, with only Here and there bare patches of rock to give assurance that something underlies the snow covering. Man's habitations in the northern hemisphere extend to the seventy-eighth parallel of latitude, and formerly extended to the eighty-second; in the southern hemisphere they find their limit in Fuegia, in the fifty-fifth parallel, fully three hundred and fifty miles nearer to the equator than where, as in the Shetland Islands, ladies in lawn dresses disport in the game of tennis. And still seven hundred miles farther from the equator, in Siberia, Nordenskjöld found forests of pine rising with trunks seventy to one hundred feet in height. Yet it must not be supposed that there are not, as is perhaps commonly assumed, gleams of warm sunshine in this inhospitable south; indeed, we have yet to learn to what extent the far south is warm or cold. Thus, Captain Kristensen, the gallant commander of the Antarctic, who made the first landing on what is assumed to be the mainland of Antarctica, asserts that on January 5, 1895, when nearly on the sixty-eighth parallel of latitude, "the sun at noon gave so much heat that I took my coat off, and the crew were lying basking in the sunshine on the forecastle" (Transactions of the Royal Geographical Society of Australasia, Victorian Branch, March, 1896, page 87); and Biscoe, writing on the 16th of January, 1831 (on