The cumulative effect of all these changes—greater water area, greater inflow of warm surface water, less inflow of cold river water, less ice-development—must have been a mild equable rainy climate, entirely suitable to a rich vegetation. The sub-tropical aspect of that vegetation should not be stressed, for it was probably as much an expression of the geological age of the period in question as of its climate. The objection may be raised that at the present time the sub-antarctic islands in the great Southern Ocean have the most maritime climate in the world, but are not by any means places of opulent vegetation. The difference is entirely accounted for by the presence of the great ice-bearing Antarctic continent. Its effect is twofold. Firstly, the glaciers shed into the Southern Ocean an immense quantity of ice and ice-cold water annually, which must have an appreciable effect on temperature. Secondly, the presence of this ice-covered continent and the floating ice in its neighbourhood extending as far as the sixtieth parallel, by forming a marked contrast with the warmer waters further north, greatly intensifies the strength of the atmospheric circulation in these regions, resulting in the development of a great succession of severe storms which sweep the sub-antarctic islands. There are no great land-masses to break the force of the wind, and these latitudes are among the stormiest, windiest regions of the earth—gale succeeding gale, winter and summer alike; and it is largely to the extraordinary power of the wind that we must attribute the desolate appearance of the islands.