Former Wide Extension of Land 207 
also on the Asiatic continent, and the species being often 
identical. On the other hand, the fauna of islands to the 
eastward are more closely connected with Australia, and 
must at one time have been joined to it by nearly continuous 
land. Honeysuckers and lories take the place of the wood- 
peckers, barbets, trogons, and fruit thrushes of the western 
islands, and the many mammals belonging to Asiatic genera 
are no more seen. 
Mr. Wallace ascribes the present isolation of the islands, 
and their separation from the adjoining continents, to the 
submergence of the channels between them caused by the 
abstraction of matter thrown out by the numerous volcanoes. 
Looking, however, at the fact that at the time when these 
islands were probably connected with the continents of Asia 
on the one side and Australasia on the other, namely, at the 
close of the pliocene period, England was connected with the 
continent; Malta, as shown by its fossil elephants, with 
Africa; the West Indies with Yucatan and Venezuela; it 
seems to me more probable that the cause was not a local 
one, but a general lowering of the waters of the ocean all 
over the world to at least one thousand feet,—produced by 
the prodigious quantity of water locked up in the frozen 
masses that covered a great part of both hemispheres. 
The wide diffusion of the Malayan dialects over the Pacific, 
reaching as far as the Sandwich Islands, shows the great 
extension of that race in former times. On numerous islands 
in Polynesia there are cyclopean ruins utterly out of keeping 
with their present size and population. Who can look at 
the pictures of little Easter Island, with its gigantic images 
standing up in unworshipped solitude, without feeling that 
that insignificant islet could never have supported the race 
that reared the monuments. But if that and other islands 
were once hills overlooking peopled lowlands, the sense of 
incongruity vanishes. We see the images, not gazing 
gloomily over the ocean that narrowly circles them in, but 
proudly looking across wide plains peopled by their wor- 
shippers, who from their villages and fields behold the gods 
they adore, and implore their protection and support. 
Was the fabled Atlantis really a myth, or was it that 
great continent in the Atlantic laid bare by the lowering of 
