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land (only removed twice as far to the westward) would present
an island “ almost wholly covered with everlasting snow,”
and having each bay terminated by ice-cliffs, from which
great masses yearly detached, would sometimes bear with
them fragments of rock. This island would only boast of
one laud bird, a little grass and moss; yet m the same
latitude the sea might swarm with living creatures. A
chain of mountains, which we will call the Cordillera, running
north and south through the Alps (but having an
altitude much inferior to the latter), would connect them
with the central part of Denmark. Along this whole line
nearly every deep sound would end in “ bold and astonishing
glaciers.” In the Alps themselves (with their altitude
reduced by about half) we should find proofs of recent
elevations, and occasionally terrible earthquakes would cause
such masses of ice to be precipitated into the sea, that
waves tearing all before them, would heap together enormous
fragments, and pile them up in the corners of the
valleys. At other times, icebergs, “ charged with no inconsiderable
blocks of granite,” * would be floated from the
flanks of Mont Blanc, and then stranded on the outlying
islands of the Jura. Who then will deny the possibility of
these things having actually taken place in Europe during a
former period, and under circumstances known to be different
from the present, when on merely looking to the other hemisphere,
we see they are among the daily order of events ?
To the northward of our new Cape Horn, we should
only have certain knowledge of a few island groups, situated
in the latitude of the south part of Norway, and others in
that of Ferroe. These, in the middle of summer, would be
buried under snow, and surrounded by walls of ice ; so that
scarcely a living thing of any kind would be supported on
the land. If some bold navigator attempted to penetrate
beyond these islands towards the pole, he would run a
* G e o g r a p h ic a l J o u r n a l . C a p t. K in g u se s th e s e w o rd s w h e n a llu d in g
to th e ca°se in S ir G . E y r e ’s S o u n d , w h ic h I h a v e m o re fu lly d e s c rib ed
from th e in fo rm a tio n o f M r . B y n o e .
thousand dangers, and only meet an ocean strewed with
mountain-rnasses of ice.
At the Ferroe islands (or we may say a little to the southward
of the Wiljui, where Pallas found (in lat. G4° N.) the
frozen rhinoceros), a body buried under the surface of the
soil would undergo so little decomposition, that years afterwards
(as in the instance mentioned at South Shetland,
62°-63° S.), every feature might be recognised perfect and
unchanged. I particularly allude to this circumstance,
because the case of the Siberian animals preserved with
their flesh in the ice, offers the same apparent difficulty
with the glaciers; namely, the union in the same hemisphere
of a climate in some senses severe, with one allowing
of the life of those forms which at present, although
abounding without the tropics, do not approach the frozen
zones.
The perfect preservation of the Siberian animals, perhaps
presented, till within a few years, one of the most difficult
problems which geology ever attempted to solve. On the
one hand it was granted, that the carcasses had not been
drifted from any great distance by any tumultuous deluge, and
on the other it was assumed as certain, that when the animals
lived, the climate must have been so totally different, that
the presence of ice in the vicinity was as incredible, as would
be the freezing of the Ganges. Mr. Lyell in his “ Principles
of Geology”* has thrown the greatest light on this subject,
by indicating the northerly course of the existing rivers with
the prohabihty that they formerly carried carcasses in the
same direction; by showing (from Humboldt) how far the
inhabitants of the hottest countries sometimes wander; by
insisting on the caution necessary in judging of habits between
animals of the same genius, when the species are not identical;
and especially by liringing forward in the clearest manner the
probable change from an insular to an extreme climate, as the
* I n th e fo u r th a n d s u b s e q u e n t e d itio n s .