BY PROFESSOR STEPHENS. 349 



First, — we behold an Australian group of islands extending 

 from below the Tropic, and perhaps even from the Asiatic conti- 

 nent, up to an Antarctic Archipelago or continent, which is also 

 approached in like manner by two other oceanic lands ; one, a 

 group of islands to the east, representing the present New Zealand, 

 the other, a great way further to the westward, being the southern 

 prolongation of the African continent ; but we cannot make out 

 anything of the corresponding extremity of South America. 



In all of these are ranges of mountains rising into the clouds 

 above those areas which are marked in geological maps as occu- 

 pied by the older crystalline rocks, their summits white in 

 many regions with perennial snows, and fostering glaciers 

 in their upper hollows. The lower hills, where they are 

 shaped out of sedimentary rocks, are full of the fossils 

 which we call Silurian or perhaps also Devonian. If we 

 confine our attention to the Eastern portion of the area 

 roughly marked out above, that is to say, Eastern Australia, 

 New Zealand, and the intervening portion of the Pacific, disre- 

 garding the larger western part formed by Western Australia, 

 the Indian Ocean and South Africa, but remembering at the same 

 time that both the seas mentioned are practically landlocked 

 towards the south, we shall see that the warm equatorial currents 

 of the Pacific which then as now flowed southwards along the 

 eastern shores of both the eastern and the western islands, and 

 through the various channels which divided each of those groups 

 were not as now confronted, split up and chilled, in or about "the 

 forties," by a vast and continuous flood of cold water from the 

 west, nor by the influx of still colder drifts of iceladen currents 

 from the polar seas, but were defended from both by tracts of 

 land which at the present moment are submerged. The cur- 

 rents flowing from the equatorial regions were thus forced to 

 return along the northern shores of the Antarctic lands, 

 warming them as the Gulf Stream now warms the coast of 

 Norway, and to complete their circle by bathing the western 

 shores also of New Zealand, which thus lay between two currents, 

 one much the warmer, running southwards, the other cooled but 



