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Then, having accomplished 4,700 miles since she left Dahomey, she passed the last islands of the Magellanic archipelago, whose most southerly outpost, lashed by the everlasting surf, is the terrible Cape Horn. Next day was the 24th of July; and the 24th of July in the southern hemisphere corresponds to the 24th of January in the northern. The fifty-sixth degree of latitude had been left behind.
The duck order is very rich, numbering at least twenty species, including two beautiful upland geese, winter visitors from Magellanic lands, and two swans, the lovely black-necked, and the pure white with rosy bill. Of rails, or ralline birds, there are ten or twelve, ranging from a small spotted creature no bigger than a thrush to some large majestic birds.
Now, too, the Magellanic clouds appeared in the heavens, composed probably of countless millions of worlds, so far away that the human mind can scarcely calculate their distance from this tiny world of ours.
With such views as these I set out at first from England; and would, according to the method I proposed formerly, have gone westward through the Magellanic Strait, or round Tierra del Fuego rather, that I might have begun my discoveries upon the eastern and least known side of the Terra Australis.
It seems to be incapable of developing save under galactic conditions. All the stars marked by it lie near the central line of the Milky Way, or in the Magellanic Clouds. They tend also to gather into groups. Circles of four degrees radius include respectively seven in Argo, eight in Cygnus. The first spectroscopic star catalogue was published by Dr. Vogel at Potsdam in 1883.
This difficulty is presented by the phenomena of the Magellanic clouds. Describing the larger of these, Sir John Herschel says:
I have before me as I write a picture of the southern heavens, drawn by myself, in which this vacant space eccentric in position but circular in shape is shown. The centre lies close by the Lesser Magellanic cloud between the stars Kappa Toucani and Eta Hydri of our modern maps, but much nearer to the last named.
"It is not, however, the shells I care for, but the teeth of the animals within. One species is European, one Japanese, the third Tristan. So you see how strangely isolated your Tristan species is. Its nearest cousins are in Tunis and Abyssinia. I fancy the land shells of Tristan will not have a Magellanic character like the one Kerguelen species. Anyhow they are sure to be intensely interesting."
Comparative To those related in my grand-dad's narrative. In June, 1764, Byron sailed with two ships, the "Dolphin" and the "Tamar," on a voyage of discovery arranged by Lord Egmont, to seek a southern continent, in the course of which he took possession of the largest of the Falkland Islands, again passed through the Magellanic Straits, and sailing home by the Pacific, circumnavigated the globe.
A year ago, according to the records they left behind them, they migrated to the Greater Magellanic Cloud." Philip was indignant. "Why didn't they take their dogs with them?" "They couldn't. After all, they had to leave their cars and their furniture behind them too, not to mention almost unbelievable stockpiles of every metal imaginable that will last us for centuries.
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