Page:The Botany of the Antarctic Voyage.djvu/251

Kerguelen's Land is the eastern limit to which the Fuegian Flora extends, and though placed within the 50th degree its desolate nature is proverbial. The Antarctic Expedition arrived there in May 1840, having been blown off its tempestuous coast twice, after approaching the land so nearly as to distinguish almost the nature of the vegetation which skirts the shores of the bays. The island presents a black and rugged mass of sterile mountains, rising by parallel steppes one above another in alternate slopes and precipices, terminating in frightful naked and frowning cliffs, which dip perpendicularly into the sea. The snow lying upon these slopes between the black cliffs gave a most singularly striped or banded appearance to the whole country, each band indicating a flow of volcanic matter, for the island is covered with, craters whose vents have given issue to stream upon stream of molten rock. These are worn all along the coasts into abrupt escarpments, rendering a landing impracticable, except at the heads of the sinuous bays. One bluff headland to the north end of the island is a precipice, 700 feet high, and exposes such numerous sections of horizontal deposits of red, black, and grey volcanic matter that it is difficult to count them, though overlaying one another with perfect regularity and uniformity. Sterile as Kerguelen's Land now is, it was not always so, vast beds of coal are covered by hundreds of consecutive layers of igneous and other rocks, piled to a height of one thousand feet and upwards, upon what was once a luxuriant forest. Throughout many of the lava streams are found prostrate trunks of fossil trees of no mean girth, and the incinerated remains of recent ones, which had been swallowed up simultaneously with the fossil, and these occur in strata of various ages, so that it seems impossible to reckon the period of time that must have elapsed between the origin, growth, and destruction of the successive forests now buried in one hill. A section of such a hill would display coal-beds and shale resting upon a blue basalt, at the level of the sea, covered again with whinstone, whereon are deposited successive layers of volcanic sand, baked clay-stones, porphyries, and long hues of basaltic cliffs, formed of perpendicular prisms, regularly shaped like those of Staffa or the Giant's Causeway, and along which the traveller may walk even for a mile without ascending or descending fifty feet. To calculate the time required for the original formation and following silicification of one such forest, and to multiply that by the equal number of different superincumbent strata, containing remains similar to those displayed at the north end of Kerguelen's Land, would give a startling number of years, during which periods the island must have deserved a better name than that of "Desolation." And if to this be added the time requisite for the deposit of the arenaceous beds containing the impressions of Fuci, of the clays afterwards hardened by fire, and of the prismatic cliffs, which, with the arenaceous, indicate that the land was alternately submerged and exposed as often as these successive formations occur, such a sum would bespeak an antiquity for the flora of this isolated speck on the surface of our globe far beyond our powers of calculation. If from the narrow sphere of inquiry that a few miles in extent and 1000 feet of elevation in Kerguelen's Land afford we deduce such grand results, what must be expected from the investigation of whole continents, whose culminant peaks reach nearly 30,000 feet, surrounded by an ocean perhaps as elevated above