262 VIEWS, &C PHYSIOGNOMY OF PLANTS. 



enclosed by walls. According to Darwin, the following is 

 the process of formation. An island mountain closely en- 

 circled by a coral reef subsides, while the fringing reef that 

 had sunk with it, is constantly recovering its level owing to 

 the tendency of the coral animals to regain the surface by 

 renewed perpendicular structures; these constitute first a reef 

 encircling the island at a distance, and subsequently, when 

 the inclosed island has wholly subsided, an atoll. According 

 to this view, which regards islands as the most prominent 

 parts, or the culminating points of the submarine land, the 

 relative position of the coral islands would disclose to us what 

 we could scarcely hope to discover by the sounding line, viz., 

 the former configuration and articulation of the land. This 

 attractive subject (to the connection of which with the migra- 

 tions of plants and the distribution of the races of men we 

 drew attention at the beginning of this note), can only be 

 fully elucidated when we shall succeed in acquiring further 

 knowledge of the depth and nature of the different rocks 

 which serve as a foundation for the lower strata of the dead 

 polyp -trunks. 



(8) p. 216 — " Of the Samothracian Traditions" 



Diodorus has preserved to us these remarkable traditions, 

 the probability of which has invested them with almost his- 

 torical certainty in the eyes of geologists. The island of 

 Samothrace, once also named Ethiopea, Dardania, and Leu- 

 cania or Leucosia in the Scholiast of Apollonius Rhodius, the 

 seat of the ancient mysteries of the Cabiri, was inhabited by 

 the remnant of an aboriginal people, several words of whose 

 vernacular language were preserved in later times in sacrificial 

 ceremonies. The position of Samothrace, opposite to the 

 Thracian ITebrus, and near the Dardanelles, explains why a 

 more circumstantial tradition of the great catastrophe of an 

 outburst of the waters of the Pontus (Euxine) should have 

 been especially preserved in this island. Sacred rites were 

 here performed at altars erected on the supposed limits of this 

 inundation; and among the Samothracians, as well as the 

 Boeotians, a belief in the periodical destruction of the human 

 race (a belief which also prevailed among the Mexicans in their 

 myth of the four destructions of the world) was associated with 



