126 president's address — section e. 



From the days of Plato to Donnelly we have heard, at intervals, 

 of the buried Atlantis; Dr. Bowdler Sharpe has now brought 

 foi'ward a formidable rival to it in the South Seas. Lecturing at 

 the Royal Institution on the geographical distribution of birds, 

 he suggested " that there once was a great continent, with its centre 

 at the South Pole, now submerged under 2,000 fathoms of water. 

 It embraced," he said, " New Zealand, South America, Madagascar, 

 Mauritius, and Australia ; thus is explained the existence of the 

 •cognate struthious (wingless) birds that now exist, or did once exist, 

 in these countries." 



That great changes have in past ages occurred, and are still 

 taking place, must be evident to every student of nature. 



General Strachey, R.E., F.R.G.S., late President of the Royal 

 Geographical Society of England, in his fourth lecture on 

 geography, delivered before the University of Cambridge in 1888, 

 says — " Of the origin of life, either when or how it began, we know 

 nothing ; all that can be said is that the earlier conditions of the 

 earth were altogether incompatible with life as we know it. For 

 ages, as the globe cooled down, its surface must have been deluged 

 with boiling water, and, until a temperature had been established 

 not very greatly exceeding the present, none of the forms of life 

 found in the lowest fossiliferous rocks could have come into 

 existence." 



The opinion that life originated in the North Polar regions, where 

 the gradually cooling globe must first have reached a temperature 

 in which it became possible to live, was, I think, first expressed by 

 Buffon. There are indications, considered valid by competent 

 authorities, that it was aroiind the North Polar area that both 

 vegetable and animal life were in the first instance developed, and 

 thence disseminated over the rest of the earth. Within this area 

 have been found representations of all the principally known 

 fossiliferous systems, containing the remains of plants and animals 

 closely resembling the present inhabitants of far lower latitudes, 

 and even of tropical climates. Thus, in lat. 82° N. Silurian rocks 

 exist, containing corals such as are to be now found under the 

 equator in water of a temperature of 70° to 85* Fahr. In other 

 localities, within 10° of the North Pole, remains of deciduous trees, 

 similar in all respects to those now growing in warmer temperate 

 regions, have been discovered. 



Until aboiit the middle of the present century both man and the 

 world were popularly supposed to be about 6,000 years old, or, 

 according to Jewish chronology, 5,654 years on the 12th of this 

 present month (September, 1893); but during the last fifty years the 

 discoveries made by Egyptologists, and the excavations of buried 

 monuments of Assyria, Arabia, Phoenicia, and recently in the valley 

 of the Mississippi, and the bringing to light of hieroglyphics, 

 inscriptions, and fossil remains on our planet at an epoch almost 

 inconceivably remote from our own ; the discovery of a human skull 



