PKEHISTOMC BOMBAY. 133 



the whole island bids fair soon to be a flat oval, raised only a few feet 

 above the sea. Then, when Lord Macaulay'sNew Zealander, educated 

 into a cold-weather globe-trotter, arrives from the ruins of London 

 Bridge at those of the Apollo Bunder, he will hear with wonder of 

 Malabar Hill and Back Bay, and ask with incredulous surprise how 

 they could ever have existed, or, having existed, whither they have 

 disappeared. He will not however be in the plight of the traveller 

 of the Eastern fable, who, on revisiting the same spot at intervals of 

 a thousand years, and finding it, now a city, then a lake, and again 

 an arid waste, was informed by the inhabitants on each occasion that 

 it had always been as he then saw it. For, of the changes now in 

 progress round us, the history will be preserved in many written 

 records. 



But I am to speak to you to-day of changes far greater than those 

 now in progress, effected in the ages before there were any men on 

 earth to write their record. How then, you ask, can I know of 

 them ? "Well, I frankly admit I cannot know, in the sense of abso- 

 lute certainty. But what is there we can so know ? Even in 

 matters of history, we are liable to be misled or misinformed through 

 the partiality or ignorance of the human historian. This risk at 

 least we escape in dealing with prehistoric times. For, as to them, 

 there lies at our feet a book, written by the hand of Nature, in letters 

 that cannot lie. True it is, we can open only a few of its pages, and 

 possibly may misread the characters we find traced even on these. 

 But that is the misfortune of the reader, not the fault of the writer. 

 The whole truth is there, if we can decipher it, and one or two of 

 these pages I ask you to turn with me to-day. 



But before we do so, see how just a metaphor is that of the book. 

 You all know that this globe of the earth which we inhabit is not a 

 homogeneous mass from the surface to the antipodes, nor even all 

 over its surface. The solid constituents of its crust are composed of 

 different rocks, arranged one above the other in layers, or "strata/' 

 like the leaves of a book, and, like the leaves of a book, always in 

 the same order. In some places some of the strata may be missing, 

 as sometimes pages from a book. But you never find the order 

 of the strata reversed. You never, for instance, find the chalk below 

 the coal, nor the coal below the old red sandstone, any more than in 



