ANTARCTIC LANDS. The islands and continent surrounding the South Pole of the earth. Re ports of recent explorations in the Antarctic region have served as foundations for an hy pothesis that there must be a considerable con tinent about the South Pole. The outer edges of this land have been found accessible at a few points, and'it seems to be bordered by numerous low island masses. Of the topography, little is known. Ross in 1842 found that Victoria Land was crossed by mountain ranges, which included volcanic peaks from 7000 to feet in height, and Mount Erehus was even then in active erup tion. Other active volcanoes to the south of Cape Horn were found and visited by Larsen in 1895. Fragments of continental rocks, such as granite, gneiss, sehist, and sandstones, dredged up by various expeditions, the discovery by Lar sen of fossil coniferous wood on Seymour Island, and mollusean shells closely resembling lower Tertiary forms that occur in Patagonia, as also the characteristic form and structure of the Ant arctic icebergs and the general slope of the oceanic floo•—all indicate the existence of ex tensive land areas around the South Pole. These lands, however, are buried beneath ice sheets of great. thickness. Long stretches of the coast are
bordered by the fronts of glaciers. and great tongues of ice are projected, sometimes for many miles, into the sea. Ross sailed for about four hundred and fifty miles along a wall of ice more than two hundred feet high; either the side or the face of a glacier. Where the lands are bo• dered by high mountains, the front of the ice cover is only 10 to 20 feet high. and in many places no land ice comes down to the shore: at Cape Adare, for example, a pebbly beach was found, and the Belgic() expedition (1898) made twenty landings on bare rocks. The area of this Antarctic continent. supposing it to include Vic toria Land, Wilkes Land. Kemp Land. Enderby Land, Graham Land. and Alexander T. Land, has been roughly estimated at nearly 4,000,000 square miles, an area greater than that of Australia. On the Antarctic lands mosses and lichens were found, but the only flower-bearing plant was a grass of the genus Aira. A small form of fly, a Podurella, and three or four species of mites, represent the land fauna. Raeovitza inclines to the opinion that the former Antarctic land fauna was destroyed during the great glacial period.