It specifies the axis along which the means are computed. By default axis=0. This is consistent with the numpy.mean usage when axis is specified explicitly (in numpy.mean, axis==None by default, which computes the mean value over the flattened array) , in which axis=0 along the rows (namely, index in pandas), and axis=1 along the columns. For added clarity, one may choose to specify axis="index" (instead of axis=0) or axis="columns" (instead of axis=1).
+------------+---------+--------+
| | A | B |
+------------+---------+---------
| 0 | 0.626386| 1.52325|----axis=1----->
+------------+---------+--------+
| |
| axis=0 |
↓ ↓