Remarks on the plant geography of the southern cold temperate zone

• Published in: Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series B. Biological Sciences
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: The Royal Society 1960
• Subjects: General Medicine; Antarctic; The Antarctic; Kerguelen; New Zealand; Hooker; Huxley; Terra Australis; Antarc*; Antarctica; Tierra del Fuego
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.1960.0053; https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rspb.1960.0053

The difference between the northern and southern hemispheres in the distribution of land and sea fundamentally affects the problems of the origin, dispersal and distribution of the biota. Whereas a circumpolar distribution seems to be quite natural in the north, it is much more difficult to explain when we get to the south. Although the naturalists of James Cook’s first and second voyages visited both New Zealand and Tierra del Fuego, the purport of the existence of closely related but geographically widely disjunct organisms did not dawn upon them; Terra Australis, a vision of the old cosmographers to counterbalance the solid North, but searched for in vain by Cook, had disappeared from the map. It fell to Joseph Hooker to discover a circumpolar Flora Antarctica at a time when the Antarctic Continent, thus named by Ross, had become a reality. What Hooker found on truly antarctic shores was not very promising, but the discovery of fossilized gymnosperm wood on Kerguelen made him speculate on former antarctic forests and on the possibility of greater land areas where only small, scattered islands are found now. In a letter to Darwin in November 1851 (Huxley 1918, p. 445) he wrote: ‘... recent discoveries rather tend to ally the N. Zeald. Flora with the Australian—though there is enough affinity with extratropical S. America to be