278 PHYSIOGNOMY OP PLANTS. 



The entire elucidation of this attractive subject (to the connection of 

 which with the migrations of plants and the diffusion of races of 

 men attention was called at the commencement of the present 

 note) can only be hoped for when inquirers shall have succeeded in 

 obtaining greater knowledge than is now possessed of the depth and 

 the nature of the rocks on which the lowest strata of the dead 

 corals rest. 



( 8 ) p. 232." Traditions of Samothrace." 

 Diodorus has preserved to us this remarkable tradition, the 

 probability of which renders it in the eyes of the geologist almost 

 equivalent to a historical certainty. The Island of Samothrace, 

 formerly called also .ZEthiopea, Dardania, Leucania or Leucosia in 

 the Scholiast to Appollonius Rhodius, and which was a seat of the 

 ancient mysteries of the Cabiri, was inhabited by the remains of an 

 ancient nation, several words of whose language were preserved to 

 a later period in the ceremonies accompanying sacrifices. The 

 situation of this island, opposite to the Thracian Hebrus and near 

 the Dardanelles, renders it not surprising that a more detailed 

 tradition of the catastrophe of the breaking forth of the waters of 

 the Euxine should have been preserved there. Rites were per- 

 formed at altars supposed to mark the limits of the irruption of the 

 waves ; and in Samothrace, as well as in Boeotia, a belief in the 

 periodically recurring destruction of mankind (a belief which was 

 ^ ^aisa^found among the Mexicans in the form of a myth of four 

 destructions of the world) was connected with historical recollec- 

 tions of particular inundations. (Otfr. Miiller Geschichten Hel- 

 lenischer St'amme und Stadte, bd. i. s. 65 and 119.) According 

 to 'Diodorus, the Samothracians related that the Black Sea had 

 once been an inland lake, but that, being swollen by the rivers 

 which flow into it, it had broken through, first the Strait of the 

 Bosphorus, and afterwards that of the Hellespont; and this long 

 before the inundations spoken of by other nations. (Diod. Sicul. 

 lib. v. cap. 47, p. 369, Wesseling.) These ancient revolutions of 

 nature have been treated of iij a special work by Dureau de la 

 Malle, and all the information possessed on the subject has been 

 collected in Carl von HoiFs important work, entitled Geschichte der 



