FORMER LAND CONNECTIONS. 133 



•of Gondwanaland here also became flooded with basalt and injected 

 with dolerite. The equivalent Devonian to Permian strata in the 

 Falkland Islands also suffered compression in the same^way. In 

 the opposite direction the Cape folds are lost beneath the waters 

 of the Indian Ocean, but may have extended to the south of 

 Tasmania. 



These compressive earth movements must have already been 

 in progress before the close of the Triassic, but seem to have 

 attained their maxima in the Jurassic. By this time it is not 

 unlikely that the African section of Godwanaland had parted 

 from the Australian and Antarctic portions, a view that receives 

 reasonable support from palaeontological evidence; Africa, India, 

 and South America were, however, still united at this time. 



Yv T e are now entering a stage of this problem where any views 

 are of necessity largely speculative and where the fullest use has 

 to be made of all the information obtainable from the patches of 

 Mesozoic strata that fringe the present continents. 



Evidence from Marine Marginal Deposits. 



It is known that the Carboniferous and Permian ocean occu- 

 pied extra-Peninsular India, extended through Burmah and 

 Malaysia, and covered the north-western shores of Australia, where 

 a fauna of the Indian type occurs. Into this ocean the Carboni- 

 ferous land-ice had moved with a general northerly direction, both 

 in Western Australia and in Northern Peninsular India, We can 

 surmise that the ocean originally formed a gulf between the two 

 areas which started to develop either in the Triassic or in the 

 Jurassic, and to extend itself west-south-westwards into the heart 

 of the ancient continent. By the very beginning of the Cretaceous 

 it had invaded the southern end of Africa, but certainly did not 

 reach the Argentine until the end of that epoch ; not improbably 

 it progressed by following troughs in the belt of earlier and now 

 extinct, nearly east-west foldings. From evidence to be presented 

 later this new-growing southern ocean did not send an arm up .the 

 Atlantic to sever the Afro-American mass till a later period. 



The marine Jurassic strata of Western India, East Africa, and 

 Western Madagascar similarly point to the separation of India as 

 having begun from the north and that the trough between them, 

 actually initiated in the Triassic, gradually lengthened in a south- 

 south-westerly direction along the line of the present Mozambique 

 Channel. Nevertheless there is no evidence that Madagascar was 

 cut off from Africa during the Jurassic epoch; such was left until 

 the time of the great marine transgression that affected such a 

 vast proportion of the globe in the Cretaceous. This ocean largely 

 followed up the inroads that had been made in Jurassic times, and, 

 according to the hypothesis here presented, took occupation of the 

 spaces formed by the gradual drawing apart of the several sections 

 of Gondwanaland. 



The Lower Cretaceous faunas of Western Australia, Assam, 

 Western Peninsular India, Eastern Madagascar, Portuguese East 

 Africa, and South Africa are closely allied, but the equivalent 



