Page:The Botany of the Antarctic Voyage.djvu/252

220 the land it rests upon, and presenting fossiliferous strata that we believe are deposited at even greater depths? On the other hand, referring to the island under consideration, as it now appears, we may regard it as the remains of some far more extended body of land. Position in longitude in the Southern Hemisphere appears to determine the amount of vegetation an island may possess. Of this we have an instance in South Georgia, and the reason is evident; the extension of the great continents is in longitude, and the climate and other features of the islands depend upon then proximity to the land, which modifies the desolating influence of the icy ocean. The time we have granted for the formation of the various strata composing Kerguelen's Land and the forests that successively decorated them, is sufficient for the destruction of a large body of land to the northward of it, of which St. Paul's Island and Amsterdam Island may be the only remains, or for the subsidence of a chain of mountains running east and west, of which Prince Edward's Island, Marion, and the Crozets are the exposed peaks. With regard to the botanical characteristics of Kerguelen's Land, full notices of them have been prepared for Sir James Ross's narrative of the Antarctic voyage, and the subject will be further treated in a work devoted to the distribution of vegetation in the southern regions.

The Islands of St. Paul and Amsterdam, hitherto ranked under no geographical or botanical regions, perhaps demand notice here. Though constantly sighted by outward-bound Indiamen and Australian ships, they have been rarely visited, and never by scientific persons, except those accompanying Lord Macartney's embassy to China, and very recently by my former companion and zealous cooperator in all scientific pursuits, Lieut. A. Smith, R. N. Some confusion still exists with regard to the names of these two islands, which are situated north-west of Kerguelen's Land, in the longitude of 78&deg;, and the respective latitudes of 38&deg; and 39&deg;. The names of St. Paul and Amsterdam have been applied indiscriminately by various navigators, the latter I continue to give to the southern island, in accordance with Sir George Staunton's and with the recent south circumpolar charts, where, however, the southernmost island is represented as the larger instead of the smaller of the two. Both are no doubt of volcanic origin, though only Amsterdam is in a state of activity. The latter alone has been visited by Sir G. Staunton, who has published an excellent account of it, and by Lieut. Smith who had the kindness to forward me most interesting particulars regarding it, and a collection of all the plants he was enabled to detect there. No one reading Sir George Staunton's account, and especially after looking at his plans and sketches of Amsterdam Island, can fad to be struck with the similarity its most remarkable features present to those of Deception Island, one of the South Shetlands. They are of the same size; both are annular craters, open to the eastward, inclosing a deep lagoon with a conical hill on each side of the entrance; that at the northern end being the highest, and both are nuclei of heated matter, with a thin covering of soil, through which escape streams and springs of warm or boiling water. The general nature of the vegetation of Amsterdam Island is described by Mr. Smith to be a coarse tufted grass, which springing from a bed of fine black peat composed of decomposed fibrous vegetable