Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/350

334 course in 1894–’95, attaining off Victoria Land, with clear water ahead of them, latitude 74° south, confirm in almost every detail the observations of their predecessor, adding some additional facts regarding the large glaciers which descend from the heights of the Sabine Mountains. They were the first to set foot on the mainland (or main island) of Antarctica, and to them science also owes the first discovery within this realm of a rock-covering vegetation (lichens?—on Possession Island and Cape Adare).

In its relation to other continents there is reason to believe that Antarctica, whether as a continent or in fragmented parts, had a definite connection with one or more of the land masses lying to the north, and the suspicion can hardly be avoided that such connection was, if with nothing else, with at least New Zealand (and through it with Australia) and Patagonia. In the fragmented parts of Graham Land archipelago and the outlying South Orkney and South Georgian Islands, we seem to have the bond of connection with the South American main; or, more specifically, a line of curvature of the great Andean chain, which, in its broken parts, can still be traced far beyond its present continental termination. If this concept is a true one, it places before us a parallel to the Andean curvature in the northern part of the South American continent, where the mountain system is deflected off into the broken mass of the Lesser Antilles; to the Aleutian flexure of the Cordilleran system of North America; and to the "Apennine-Atlas" and "Carpathian-Balkan" flexures of the Alpine mountains, the nature of which has been so clearly stated by Suess. In fact, it is hardly possible that any very extensive meridional or latitudinal mountain chain could have been forced up through contractional force without some such deflection being represented in one or more parts of its course; and where these deflections are found they are almost certain to be areas of breakage. The disruption of the Andean system is still (or has until recently been) taking place, as is evidenced in a portion of the Chilian archipelago.

When we look for the evidence of connection such as has been indicated, we find it in the fossils of Cape Seymour, already referred to, in a part of the living fauna of the continents of the southern hemisphere, and in the vestiges of a past life which these continents reveal. Thus, among land animals whose history favors this view, are the South American ostriches, whose close and only immediate allies are the ostriches and other large ratite birds of the African and Australian regions. The union of these birds in the southern continents, whatever may have been the exact place of their origination, gives evidence of migration, and this migration in the case of non flying birds could only have taken place along united land areas. It may be assumed, and has