LIFE ON THE EARTH. 167 



into Syria, Egypt and Africa, and communicated with 

 the Atlantic by a strait, where now is the valley of 

 the Garonne and the basin of Bordeaux. The Black 

 Sea was connected to a long gulf up the vale of 

 the Danube. Land stood up in this large tract of 

 ocean only in small islands or much ramified masses, 

 where now appear the mountains in the centre of 

 France, in Germany, on the borders of Bohemia 

 and Moravia, in the Hartz, and Carpathians. The 

 British Isles formed almost a complete western 

 boundary, while small points and narrow ridges of 

 land marked the rising Alps and Apennines, and 

 the mountains of Dalmatia and Croatia. 



In a far earlier period, after the deposition of the 

 Carboniferous Strata, many of the great features of 

 the British Isles and Scandinavia had been firmly 

 fixed by the axes of elevation which range north- 

 eastward from Ireland, through Scotland to the 

 Norwegian Alps, and eastward along the south of 

 Ireland and the south of England, through Belgium, 

 and across the Valley of the Rhine ; this last tract 

 was afterwards sunk again and partly covered up 

 by secondary and tertiary deposits, but the former 

 was never again wholly submerged. 



But in the still earlier Cambro-Silurian period, the 

 broad ocean flowed over nearly every part of the area 

 now occupied by land in the whole of the northern 



