182 MADAGASCAR FOSSILS AND " LEMURIA." [CH. Ill 



Suess terms " Gondwana land " instead of Lemuria. But 

 if so, why are there no European plants in the same strata 

 in India, &c. ? For such plants do occur in the carboni- 

 ferous strata of certain parts of Africa and Brazil. Nor 

 do we find this kind of evidence only in carboniferous 

 times. In the formation known as Cenomanian we have 

 similar evidence, though in this case derived from marine 

 organisms and thus serving to check the data derived 

 from plants. At Nerbudda, in Western India, eight species 

 of fossil Echinoderms have been found, of which six are 

 also known from European rocks. But in South India 

 26 species have been found, of which only four, and two 

 of these are doubtful, occur in European strata. The 

 inference obviously is that the Nerbudda fossils are the 

 remains of animals which lived in a sea continuous with 

 the sea of the same period in Europe, and that the 

 Trichinopoly beds are the bottom of a sea which was 

 separated from the northern sea by a land barrier. The 

 Trichinopoly fauna recurs in Natal. 



Further evidence of the same kind comes to hand from 

 a study of the Jurassic fauna of the world. Lastly, the 

 fossil Belemnites of Madagascar are not identical with 

 those of the beds of a corresponding age in Uitenhage, a 

 fact which may at first sight appear to be hardly worth 

 bringing forward in support of the present hypothesis. But 

 the interesting fact about these fossils is that they belong- 

 to forms which are typical dwellers in warm seas, while the 

 single Uitenhage Belemnite is as distinctively a cold-water 

 form, thus tending to prove the existence of a belt of land 

 shutting off a cold south sea from a warmer equatorial sea. 



