5902.] AND ANCIENT GEOGRAPHY. 373 



America). The essential point in this respect is the investigation 

 of the geological relation of Europe to A?ia. 



Europe did not exist as a continent — i.e., as a continuous mass — 

 from the beginning of the earth's history up to about the middle of 

 the Tertiary. Indeed, there was a number of larger and smaller 

 islands in the old Tethys, but they never were connected so as to 

 assume continental shape. To the north, however, we had the 

 large Scandinavian mass, which probably was connected over 

 Greenland with North America, but we shall disregard this possible 

 junction, since our present material, the Decapod Crustaceans, do 

 not furnish additional facts which bear upon it. 



The Tethys, as we have seen (p. 367), covered the whole region 

 of the present Mediterranean Sea and extended over Western Asia, 

 reaching, in the older Eocene, not only as far as the Indian Ocean, 

 but in an easterly and northerly direction as far as the eastern side 

 of the Kuen-Lun mountains and the Gobi desert. 1 Subsequently, 

 in the Miocene, the western parts of Asia (from Asia Minor and 

 Syria to India) became land (Neumayr, p. 501), and the Tethys 

 was cut into a western (the present Mediterranean Sea) and an 

 eastern section (forming part of the Indian Ocean). But during 

 this time, and even afterward, the northern and northeastern parts 

 of the old Tethys persisted. The Miocene Mediterranean Sea 

 (Neumayr, 1890, p. 516) sent a strait from the basin of the Rhone 

 river (France) through Switzerland into Austria, which there 

 widened out into the Pannonian basin and in the Upper Miocene 

 became a huge inland sea, the Sarmatian, which was cut off from 

 its former western connection with the Mediterranean and reached 

 from Austria over Southern Russia into the region of the Caspian 

 and Aral Seas (Neumayr, p. 523). To the south of this sea the 

 present Balkan Peninsula, the ^Egean Sea and Asia Minor were 

 largely land, but in Eastern Asia Minor a continuation of the 

 Mediterranean Sea approached almost to the Black Sea. The 

 region of the Caucasus mountains was probably sea up to Miocene 



1 In the Kuen-Lun mountains there are, according to Bogdanowitsch. 

 {Geolog. Untersuck. im oestlichen Turkestan, 1892, Russian. Review in 

 Neues Jahrb. f. Mineral., etc., 1895, Vol. 2 » P- IIO )» Archaic and Paleozoic 

 rocks and traces of Jurassic dep »sits (coal bearing strata), and then again marine 

 Cretaceous beds. Thus it seems that these mountains were land since beginning 

 of the Mesoz^ic times and formed part of the Sinic continent. During the Cre- 

 taceous there was a temporary transgression of the sea. 



