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A larger portion stagnates in the circumpolar region, in time slowly to return to the tropical district in a manner afterward to be described.
In the case of the affirmative, the equator is movable as well as the poles; the terrestrial latitudes are variable; no country during the lapse of ages will enjoy, even on an average, a constant climate; regions the most different will, in their turn, become circumpolar. Adopt the contrary supposition, and every thing assumes the character of an admirable permanence.
And to this continuity of the circumpolar land, and to the consequent freedom for intermigration under a more favourable climate, I attribute the necessary amount of uniformity in the sub-arctic and northern temperate productions of the Old and New Worlds, at a period anterior to the Glacial epoch.
We were not tired out; we had had more than six days' rest at the lead; and when it closed we pushed on across the pressure-ridges on to the heavy and cumbrous ice of the circumpolar sea. We were sure that we had passed the main obstruction, and in spite of the failure of Marvin and Borup to come in with the essentials of fuel-alcohol and food, Commander Peary insisted on pushing forward. Prof.
He quitted the post only when he found that its restricted opportunities offered no farther prospect of self-improvement. He now built an observatory of his own at Redhill in Surrey, with the design of completing Bessel's and Argelander's survey of the northern heavens by adding to it the circumpolar stars omitted from their view.
When they start downward they have, as observations show, a temperature not much above the freezing point of salt water. They do not congeal for the reason that the salt of the ocean lowers the point at which the water solidifies to near 28° Fahr. The effect of this action is gradually to press down the surface cold water until it attains the very bottom in all the circumpolar regions.
The first that he opened was an invitation from the Geographical Society of France, asking him and his companions to come and receive a handsome medal, which had been voted in a solemn conclave "to the navigators of the first circumpolar periplus of the arctic seas." The second envelope made Erik start, he looked at it.
Of 450 objects thus cursorily examined, only one star of the seventh magnitude, numbered 1,618 in Groombridge's Circumpolar Catalogue, gave signs of measurable vicinity. Similarly, a reconnaissance among rapidly moving stars lately made by Dr. Chase with the Yale heliometer yielded no really large, and only eight appreciable parallaxes among the 92 subjects of his experiments.
For the tortuous mountain channel, filled with whirlpools and reefs, and the home of perpetual tempest, which had been discovered in the early part of the century by Magellan, was deemed the sole opening pierced by nature through the mighty southern circumpolar continent.
Believing, from reasons before alluded to, that our continents have long remained in nearly the same relative position, though subjected to great oscillations of level, I am strongly inclined to extend the above view, and to infer that during some earlier and still warmer period, such as the older Pliocene period, a large number of the same plants and animals inhabited the almost continuous circumpolar land; and that these plants and animals, both in the Old and New Worlds, began slowly to migrate southwards as the climate became less warm, long before the commencement of the Glacial period.