President's Address. 13 
on the north and south, but was continued through Southern 
Asia to India, Tibet, and China, and even extended to Japan. 
The vast area thus indicated is now not only largely in the 
condition of dry land, but is traversed by many lofty 
mountain ranges, such as the Alps, Pyrenees, Carpathians, 
Caucasus, Himalayas, Suleiman Mountains, etc. During 
Eocene times these ranges had no existence, and we have 
clear evidence that it was not till Miocene times that the 
Nummulitic Ocean was largely obliterated, and its sedi- 
mentary deposits elevated to form continental land, and to 
enter into the composition of the greatest mountain chains 
of Eurasia. 
Now, it certainly seems to me to be somewhat of the 
nature of an abuse of terms to speak of the changes in the 
distribution of land and water just alluded to as occurring 
between the beginning of Upper Jurassic and the close of 
Eocene time, as changes of a “local” or “partial” kind, or 
to deal with these as if they merely concerned the “ fringes” 
of our present continents. If it is merely meant that the 
crust-movements necessary to produce these changes were 
“local” and “ partial,” in the sense that they did not affect 
the entire terrestrial surface, and therefore were not 
“universal,” then, doubtless, the use of these terms may-be 
logically defended. But those who advocate the doctrine 
of the permanence of the ocean-basins, and to a greater or 
less extent of the continents also, have generally used these 
terms in the same sense as that in which one would employ 
them in speaking of the oscillations of the floor of the 
Temple of Jupiter Serapis, or the littoral changes of level 
in Scandinavia and Greenland. For my part, to take one 
instance only, I cannot see the propriety of speaking of 
the earth-movements which converted the larger part of the 
great Nummulitic ocean into elevated land, bearing some of 
the highest mountain ridges in the world, as being “ local.” 
Yet these movements took place in a period as modern as 
the Tertiary, and they constitute but an episode in that 
period. 
