It is evident that a rank vegetation, which does not so much require heat as it does protection from intense cold, would approach much nearer to this zone of perpetual congelation under the equable climate of the southern hemisphere, than under the extreme climate of the northern continents.
The case of the sailor's body perfectly preserved in the icy soil of the South Shetland Islands (latitude 62 to 63 degrees south), in a rather lower latitude than that (latitude 64 degrees north) under which Pallas found the frozen rhinoceros in Siberia, is very interesting.

Although it is a fallacy, as I have endeavoured to show in a former chapter, to suppose that the larger quadrupeds require a luxuriant vegetation for their support, nevertheless it is important to find in the South Shetland Islands a frozen under-soil within 360 miles of the forest-clad islands near Cape Horn, where, as far as the BULK of vegetation is concerned, any number of great quadrupeds might be supported.

The perfect preservation of the carcasses of the Siberian elephants and rhinoceroses is certainly one of the most wonderful facts in geology; but independently of the imagined difficulty of supplying them with food from the adjoining countries, the whole case is not, I think, so perplexing as it has generally been considered.

The plains of Siberia, like those of the Pampas, appear to have been formed under the sea, into which rivers brought down the bodies of many animals; of the greater number of these only the skeletons have been preserved, but of others the perfect carcass.

Now it is known that in the shallow sea on the Arctic coast of America the bottom freezes (11/19.