1893. ARE OCEAN DEPTHS PERMANENT ? 185 
of the Alps, and continue far away to the East, to Persia, and have 
been met with by Griesbach near Balk, on the Oxus. Then these 
deposits were folded, in the Taurus, in Asia Minor, in Switzerland. 
Afterwards came the sagging-down of certain parts of these folds, 
near Vienna, in Hungary, &c., and all that varied series of con- 
sequent events. After the first Mediterranean came the formation of 
an immense horizon of salt deposits, stretching from Wieliczka to 
Persia; then a second Mediterranean reaching far into the newly- 
formed depressions ; then the appearance of vast fresh-water lakes, 
lasting through a long period of time till the breaking down of the 
/égean land and the re-conquest of the Black Sea. 
Look at smaller examples of such partial subsidences; see 
Margerie’s instructive paper on the Corbiéres, showing the sinking 
down of the Pyrenees, Miocene beds passing beyond Narbonne, while 
south of Cape Leucate two more recent Pliocene ‘‘ effondrements ” 
form the Rousillon, described by Depéret, and the Golfe de Rosas. 
But this is only part of the Tethyan history. Michelin’s and 
Duncan’s paleontological studies in the West Indies have revealed 
the European character of certain deposits. It is the ‘‘Gosau type” 
of the Cretaceous which appears in Jamaica, and the Castel- 
Gomberto horizon of Upper Oligocene (warm type of Sables de 
Fontainebleau) is known in several other isles. In regions still further 
off, one of our first masters, the venerable Dr. Philippi, has shown 
that the present molluscan fauna of the Chilian coasts is of quite 
recent origin, and that until the beginning of Quaternary times the 
European Mediterranean molluscan types stretched far down the 
western coast of South America. At the same time the Mesozoic 
deposits of Chili, and those recently discovered at Taylorville in 
California, show purely European characters, and the Neocomian of 
Bogota is the exact equivalent of that of Barréme. 
These facts teach us that an ocean-bed existed, but that some 
coast-line, maybe only an interrupted line, once stretched across the 
present Atlantic, and permitted the Gosavian and Oligocene corals, and 
the Miocene shells also, to cross. I do not overlook the fact that Dr. 
Philippi himself, struck by the analogies existing between the flora of 
Chili and that of Europe, recently refused to accept the hypothesis 
of a “bridge” to Europe, and preferred to suppose that identical 
climatic and other external causes produced analogous and even 
identical species of terrestrial plants. I refer to what has been 
excellently said by Mr. Blanford on this theory, a few years ago, 
in his address to the Geological Society of London. I believe that 
the parallel correspondence of the marine faunas up to the Qua- 
ternary period gives a more correct clue to the correspondence of the 
existing terrestrial floras in Chili and in Europe. 
So I think that we must not only concede the extinction of a great 
1 See Hyatt and Dillen on the Jura and Trias at Taylorville, California. Bull, 
Geol. Soc. America, 1892, pp. 369—412. 
