244 BEPOKT — 1891. 



to this query, it was suggested by Huxley that they may have 

 been developed in some lost continent, the boundaries of which 

 were gradually shifted by the slow elevation of the sea-margin 

 on one side and its simultaneous slow depression upon the 

 other, so that there has always been in existence a large dry 

 area with its live stock. This dry spot, with its fauna and 

 flora, like a great raft or Noah's Ark, moved with great slow- 

 ness in whatever direction the great earth-undulation travelled. 

 But to-day this area, with its fossil evidence, is a sea-bottom, 

 and Huxley supposes that the continent, which once occupied 

 a part of the Pacific Ocean, is now represented by Asia. 



This eastward movement of land-surface translation even- 

 tually created a connection between this land and Africa and 

 Europe, and if when this happened the Mammalia spread 

 rapidly over these countries this circumstance would account 

 for the abruptness of their appearance there. 



Now, Mr. Blandford, the President of the Geological 

 Society of London, in his annual address recently delivered, 

 advances matters a stage further, for he tells us that a growing 

 acquaintance with the biology of the world leads naturalists 

 to a belief that the placental Mammalia and other of the higher 

 forms of terrestrial life originated during the Mesozoic period 

 still further to the southwards — that is to say, in the lost 

 Antarctic continent, for the traces of which we desire to seek. 



But it almost necessarily follows that wherever the Mamma- 

 lia were developed there also man had his birthplace, and if 

 these speculations should prove to have been well founded we 

 may have to shift the location of the Garden of Eden from 

 the Northern to the Southern Hemisphere. 



I need hardly suggest to you that possibilities such as these 

 must add greatly to our interest in the recovery of any traces 

 of this mysterious region. This land appears to have sunk 

 beneath the seas after the close of the Mesozoic. Now, the 

 submergence of any mass of land will disturb the climatic 

 equilibrium of that region, and the disappearance of an Ant- 

 arctic continent would prove extremely potential in varying 

 the climate of this hemisphere. For to-day the sun's rays fall 

 on the South Polar regions to small purpose. If we accept 

 Croll's hypothesis we must believe that the unstable sea 

 absorbs the heat, and in wide and comparatively warm streams 

 it carries off the caloric to the Northern Hemisphere to raise 

 its temperature at the expense of ours. But when extensive 

 land received those same heat-rays, its rigid surfaces, so to 

 speak, tethered their caloric in this hemisphere, and thus, 

 when there was no mobile current to steal northwards with it, 

 warmth could accumulate and modify the climate. 



Under the influence of such changes the icy mantle would 

 be slowly rolled back towards the South Pole, and thus many 



