Most unfortunately, on the chart transmitted to Ross by Wilkes, he entered, without distinguishing marks, land between longitudes 160° E. and 165° E., near the sixty-sixth parallel, which should have been marked with the legend of "probable land," it being most probably the supposed land of Lieutenant Ringgold, of the Vincennes, who on January 13, 1840, in longitude, 163° E., latitude 65° 8´ S., to use Ringgold's own words, "thought he could discern to the southeast something like distant mountains." As a matter of fact, Ross found no bottom at six hundred fathoms over this charted land, and naturally enough pointed out that he had sailed over a clear ocean where Wilkes had laid down land. This lack of caution on the part of Wilkes led to an acrimonious controversy which had no good end, but tended to discredit among the ill-informed the discoveries of land actually made by the expedition. Ross, evidently somewhat nettled, had the questionable taste to omit from his general South Polar Chart all of Wilkes's discoveries. This course, it is hardly necessary to say, has not commended itself to the best geographers, for in the standard atlas of Stieler, issued by the famous publishing house of Justus Purthes, the discoveries claimed by Wilkes are entered, with the legend, "Wilkes Land," extending from longitude 95° E. to 160° E. It is gratifying, moreover, to note as an evidence of the impartial justice of the Royal Geographical Society, that it acknowledged the accuracy and extent of the discoveries of Wilkes and of the value of his detailed narrative of the expedition, and therefor that society awarded to him its founders' medal. Ross, it may be added, reached the highest known latitude in the Antarctic Circle, 78° 11´ S., where he discovered Victoria Land, tracing its coast from 70° to 79° S. latitude, along the meridian of 161° W., which proved to be a bold, mountainous country, practically inaccessible and having within its limits an active volcano about twelve thousand feet high--Mount Erebus. On the subject of an Antarctic continent Ross says: "There do not appear to me sufficient grounds to justify the assertion that the various patches of land recently discovered by the American, French, and English navigators on the verge of the Antarctic Circle unite to form a great southern continent." The investigations and deductions of a great scientist, the late W. B. Carpenter, give the latest word on this subject. Carpenter says: "The Antarctic ice-barrier is to be regarded as the margin of a polar ice-cap whose thickness at its edge is probably about two thousand feet.... These vast masses have originally formed part of a great ice-sheet formed by the cumulative pressure of successive snow-falls over a land area," etc. Elsewhere he adds: "That the circumpolar area is chiefly land and not water seems to be farther indicated," etc. The periphery of the ice-cap is estimated to be about ten thousand miles.