140 



miocene continent extending beyond the Azores, and 

 including all these Atlantic clusters within its embrace, 

 I will not venture to suggest : nevertheless, it is impos- 

 sible to deny that, so far as the Madeiras betoken, 

 everything would go to favour this grand and compre- 

 hensive idea. Partaking in the main of a Mediterranean 

 fauna, the northern tendency of which is in the evident 

 direction of the south-western portions of England and 

 Ireland, and with a profusion of endemic modifications 

 of its own (bearing witness to the engorgement of this 

 ancient tract with centres of radiation created expressly 

 for itself), whilst geology proclaims the fact that subsi- 

 dences on a stupendous scale have taken place, by 

 which means the ocean's groups were constituted; we 

 seem to trace out on every side records of the past, and 

 to catch the glimpses, as it were, of a veritable Atlantis 

 from beneath the waves of time *" 



* Although, for want of a better name, it may be admissible, 

 when speaking either figuratively or poetically, to allude to this 

 former region (as I have done in the above quotation) under the 

 title of " Atlantis;" yet it seems incredible that certain writers 

 (assuming its quondam existence) should have recently referred to 

 it seriously as the possible " Atlantis of the ancients ! " Consider- 

 ing that there is good reason to believe that all these islands were 

 islands in a miocene sea, and that, if (through a general elevation) 

 they were subsequently connected, the land of passage was broken 

 up long anterior to the appearance of man upon the earth, " the 

 ancients" must have assuredly merited their appellation, if they 

 could have thrown any light on a problem which belongs to an 

 epoch thus remote. Whether the "Atlantis" had any being at all 

 except in the imagination of the Latin poets, or whether (as Lord 



