ADDRESS. 



21 



So much time has heen occupied with these general views that it 

 would be impossible to trace the history of the Atlantic in detail through 

 the ages of the Palaeozoic, Mesozoic, and Tertiary. We may, however, 

 shortly glance at tbe changes of the three kinds of surface already re- 

 ferred to. The bed of the ocean seems to have remained on the whole 

 abyssal, but there were probably periods when those shallow reaches of 

 the Atlantic which stretch across its most northern portion, and partly 

 separate it from the Arctic basin, presented connecting coasts or con- 

 tinuous chains of islands sufficient to permit animals and plants to pass 

 over.' At certain periods also there were not unlikely groups of volcanic 

 islands, like the Azores, in the temperate or tropical Atlantic. More espe- 

 cially might this be the case in that early time when it was more like 

 the present Pacific ; and the line of the great volcanic belt of the Mediter- 

 ranean, the mid-Atlantic banks, the Azores, and the West India Islands 

 point to the possibility of such partial connections. These were stepping- 

 stones, so to speak, over which land organisms might cross, and some of 

 these may be connected with the fabulous or prehistoric Atlantis.^ 



In the Cambrian and Ordovician periods the distinctions, already 

 referred to, into continental plateaus, mountain ridges, and ocean depths 

 were first developed, and we find already great masses of sediment accu- 

 mulating on the seaward sides of the old Laurentian ridges, and internal 

 deposits thinning away from these ridges over the submerged continental 

 areas, and presenting very dissimilar conditions of sedimentation. It 

 would seem also that, as Hicks has argued for Europe, and Logan and 

 Hall for America, this Cambrian age was one of slow subsidence of the 

 land previously elevated, accompanied with or caused by thick deposits of 

 detritus along the borders of the subsiding land, which was pi'obably 

 covered with the decomposing rock arising from long ages of sub-aerial 

 waste. 



In the coal-formation age, its characteristic swampy flats stretched in 

 some places far into the shallower parts of the ocean.^ In the Permian 

 the great plicated mountain margins were fully developed on both sides 

 of the Atlantic. In the Jurassic the American continent probably ex- 

 tended further to sea than at present. In the Wealden age there 

 was much land to the west and north of Great Britain, and Professor 



' It would seem, from Geikie's description of the Faroe Islands, that they may be 

 a remnant of such connecting land, dating from the Cretaceous or Eocene period. 



''■ Dr. Wilson has recently argued that the Atlantis of tradition was really America, 

 and Mr. Hyde Clarke has associated this idea with the early dominance in Western 

 Europe of the Iberian race, which Dawkins connects with the Neolithic and Bronze 

 ages of archaeology. My own attention has recently been directed, through specimens 

 presented to the McGill College Museum, to the remarkable resemblances, iu cranial 

 characters, wampum, and other particulars, of the Guanches of the Canaries with 

 the aborigines of Eastern America — resemblances which cannot be accidental. 



* I have shown the evidence of this in the remnants of Carboniferous districts 

 once more extensive on the Atlantic coast of Nova Scotia and Cape Breton {^Arcadian 

 Geology). 



