in the Pacific, 6^c. 79 



highest mountains. On the lower grounds of the coast, in the 

 vicinity of Newcastle, New South Wales, there are strata of 

 clay from sixty to one hundred feet thick, abounding in ma- 

 rine shells, many of them analogous to, and some of them 

 identical with, species at this moment living in the adjacent 

 seas. 



It is not unreasonable to conjecture, that when the existing 

 lands constituted the bed of an ocean, teeming, as evinced by 

 their fossil remains, even in regions now condemned to the 

 regions of perpetual winter, with forms of animal life peculiar 

 to our tropical seas ; then the balance of land and water was 

 preserved by the existence of a broad equatorial continent, or 

 it may have been a number of large islands, whose structure 

 was chiefly, if not entirely volcanic. We can then conceive, 

 how by one of those stupendous oscillations, which an exam- 

 ination of its various strata, shows the earth's crust to have 

 experienced at different epochs ; as the Alps, the Andes, and 

 the Himalayas uprose from the abyss, and age after age con- 

 tinued to raise their aspiring summits to the skies ; the pre- 

 existing lands gradually sank and finally disappeared ; even 

 the elder mountain ranges, hiding " their diminished heads" 

 beneath the waters ; a few only of the loftiest remaining, like 

 scattered monuments, in those ancient 



" Titan peaks that overtop the wave's, 

 Beaconing a sunken world." * 



• It is a curious coincidence, if nothing more, and even to those who are not 

 in the habit of attaching much importance to the signification of names, may 

 seem worthy of this passing notice, that the appellation of " Paumotu," bestow- 

 ed by the natives upon the extensive group of lagoon islands to the eastward of 

 Tahiti, is compounded of " Fan,' lost or passed away, and " Motu," an island. 

 They have also an ancient tradition that all this region was once high land ; 

 but the gods being angered by the inhabitants, caused the sea to rise up and 

 overflow it, when all perished but one chief and iiis family, who were saved by 

 escaping to the top of Raiatea, an island a few leagues to the northwest of Ta- 

 hiti. From these, when the waters partially subsided, the i.«ilands were re- 

 peopled. Similar traditions are extant in Samoa and Hawaii. In one of these 

 the story is precisely that of Deucalion and Pyrrha, excepting that the rescued 

 pair raised up a new race by scattering cocoa-nuts instead of stones behind them. 

 I mention this only as one more instance, in addition to those already well 

 known, of the widely spread if not universal belief, in the occurrence of a del- 

 uge by which nearly the whole of inankind were once destroyed. 



