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Show 292 TIERUA DEL FUEGO. June, 1834. 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 land bird, a little grass and moss ; yet in 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 • Geographical Journal. Capt. King uses these words when alluding to the case in Sir G. Eyre's Sound, which I have more fully described from the information of Mr. Bynoe. June, 1834. ANIMALS PRESERVED IN ICE. 293 thousand dangers, and only meet an ocean strewed with mountain-masses of ice. At the Ferroe islands (or we may say a little to the southward of the Wiljui, where Pallas found (in lat. 64° 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 _lle 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 p1·esent, 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 ammals lived the climate must have been so totally different, that the ~resence of ice in the vicinity was as i~cre~ib!:' a~ w.ould be the freezing of the Ganges. Mr. Lyell m his Prmciples of Geology"* has thrown the greatest light on this subject, by indicating the northerly course of the existing river~ with the probability that they formerly carried carcasses m 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 habit~ bet~een animals of the same genius, when the species are not Identical ; and especially by bringing forward in the clearest. manner the probable change from an insular to an extreme climate, as the • In the fourth and subsequent editions. |
