306 CORALS AND CORAL ISLANDS. 
Leidy in his “ Mammalian Fauna of Dakota and Nebraska,” 
1869, announced, in 1865, a gigantic sloth of the Quater- 
nary, from Cuba, which he referred to the genus MMegalonyz, 
and Dr. Leidy named Megalocnus rodens, proving a Quater- 
nary connection between the continent and Cuba. 
The fact of an elevated condition of the region sufficient 
to make Cuba and Anguilla part of the continent during the 
earlier Quaternary, 1f not in the Pliocene also, is thus made 
quite certain. This is fully recognized by Wallace. Such a 
condition could hardly have existed without a large elevation 
also of Florida, though probably not, as Mr. Agassiz holds, 
to the full amount of the depression between it and Cuba — 
nearly 5,000 feet — because Cuba is most closely related in 
fauna to South America. The subsidence which brought the 
region to the present level was consequently within the coral- 
reef period. It is hence hardly to be doubted that the mak- 
ing of the Florida, Bahama, and other West India coral reefs 
was going on during the progress of a great subsidence. 
None of the facts mentioned by observers are opposed to 
this view. 
On this point Mr. Heilprin says :? — 
“Dr. Supan, in reviewing Professor Dana’s paper in the 
American Journal of Science for 1885,’ criticises the views 
relative to subsidence in the Floridian region, since it is 
claimed that even if direct connection did exist between the 
West Indian Islands and the southern continent, there is no 
proof that this connection extended northward to the North 
American continent ; and he further denies — without, how- 

ever, giving any reason for his denial —that there ever was 
any (Quaternary ?) connection between the West Indies and 
1 Geographical Distribution of Animals, ii. 60, 78. 
2 «The Bermudas,” 227. 
$ Petermann’s Mittheilungen, vol. xxxii. pl. 1; Litteraturbericht, p. 5. 1886. 
