LAMARCK’S WORK IN GEOLOGY 107 
were formed by the same means, and the sea not 
breaking through the Isthmus of Panama was turned 
southward, and the action of its currents resulted in 
detaching the island of Tierra del Fuego from South 
America. In like manner New Zealand was separated 
from New Holland, Madagascar from Africa, and 
Ceylon from India. 
He then refers to other “displacements of the 
ocean basin,’ to the shallowing of the Straits of 
Sunda, of the Baltic Sea, the ancient subsidence of 
the coast of Holland and Zealand, and states that 
Sweden offers all the appearance of having recently 
emerged from the sea, while the Caspian Sea, formerly 
much larger than at present, was once in communi- 
cation with the Black Sea, and that some day the 
Straits of Sunda and the Straits of Dover will be dry 
land, so that the union of England and France will 
be formed anew. 
Strangely enough, with these facts known to him, 
Lamarck did not see that such changes were due to 
changes of level of the land rather than to their being 
abandoned or invaded by the sea, but explained these 
by his bizarre hypothesis of westward-flowing currents 
due to the moon’s action; though it should be in all 
fairness stated that down to recent times there have 
been those who believed that it is the sea and not the 
land which has changed its level. 
This idea, that the sea and not the land has changed 
its levél, was generally held at the time Lamarck wrote, 
though Strabo had made the shrewd observation that 
it was the land which moved. The Greek geographer 
threw aside the notion of some of his contemporaries, 
