, which is 7 degrees farther from the equator.[175] The effects on
animal and vegetable life are remarkable. Capt. King observed large
shrubs of Fuchsia and Veronica, which in England are treated as tender
plants, thriving and in full flower in Tierra del Fuego with the
temperature at 36 degrees. He states also that humming birds were seen
sipping the sweets of the flowers "after two or three days of constant
rain, snow, and sleet, during which time the thermometer had been at the
freezing point." Mr. Darwin also saw parrots feeding on the seeds of a
tree called the winter's bark, south of lat. 55 degrees, near Cape
Horn.[176]

So the orchideous plants which are parasitical on trees, and are
generally characteristic of the tropics, advance to the 38th and 42d
degree of S. lat., and even beyond the 45th degree in New Zealand, where
they were found by Forster. In South America also arborescent grasses
abound in the dense forests of Chiloe, in lat. 42 degrees S., where
"they entwine the trees into one entangled mass to the height of thirty
or forty feet above the ground. Palm-trees in the same quarter of the
globe grow in lat. 37 degrees, an arborescent grass very like a bamboo
in 40 degrees, and another closely allied kind, of great length, but not
erect, even as far south as 45 degrees."[177]

It has long been supposed that the general temperature of the southern
hemisphere was considerably lower than that of the northern, and that
the difference amounted to at least 10 degrees Fahrenheit. Baron Humboldt,
after collecting and comparing a great number of observations, came to
the conclusion that even a much larger difference existed, but that none
was to be observed within the tropics, and only a small difference as
far as the thirty-fifth and fortieth parallel. Captain Cook was of
opinion that the ice of the antarctic predominated greatly over that of
the arctic region, that encircling the southern pole coming nearer to
the equator by 10 degrees than the ice around the north pole. All the
recent voyages of discovery have tended to confirm this opinion,
although Capt. Weddel penetrated, in 1823, three degrees farther south
than Capt. Cook, reaching lat. 74 degrees 15 minutes South, long. 34
degrees 17 minutes West, and Sir James Ross, in 1842, arrived at lat. 78
degrees 10 minutes S., as high a latitude, within three degrees, as the
farthest point attained by Captain Parry in the arctic circle, or lat.
81 degrees 12 minu