384 Reviews — CatUn's Lifted and Subsided Rocks of America. 



before us, it is a wonderful book nevertbeless. N,o, Mr. Catlin 

 has taken up the pen once more, not, however, to write on Indians, 

 but on the great physical features of Northern and Central America, 

 and to offer us his own opinions on the origin of mountaias and 

 valleys, rivers and seas, and the vast changes that have taken place 

 in the relation of land and water since man, as civilized man, occu- 

 pied Central America. Mr. Catlin, if not a profound scholar is, at 

 least, a great traveller, and his observations therefore deserve our 

 attention, even if we are unwilling to accept his theories. 



The following is a brief statement of the leading topics, and the 

 method in which they are dealt with by the author : — 



1. Mountain chains have been uplifted by plutonic agency. 



2. The uplifted mass has left .a space beneath, equal to the mass 

 originally elevated above the general surface-level of the ground. 

 As all mountains have undergone a vast amount of subeerial denuda- 

 tion and degradation, Mr. Catlin concludes that these submontagne 

 caverns must be vastly larger in proportion than the present elevated 

 rock-mass reared above them. 



3. Mountain-ranges, such as the Eocky Mountains and the Andes, 

 are vast rain and snow collecting areas. 



4. The rivers which flow along the surface of the valleys at their 

 feet, represent only a tithe of the waters falling upon their flanks, 

 whilst of that which falls within their internal complicated area, or 

 is condensed upon their snow-capped peaks, they receive none at all. 



5. The greater part of the water falling upon these mountains 

 descends at once by fissures into the submontagne caverns, and there 

 collecting, flows as a vast river, maintaining its subterranean course 

 down south to the Gulf of Mexico into which it debouches. 



6. That from the 30th degree of south latitude, the waters of the 

 Andes flow northwards, and the subterranean drainage no doubt 

 resembles that of the Eocky Mountains. 



7. That these two great submontagne rivers pour their waters by 

 submarine outlets .into the Caribean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico, 

 from which they debouch as the Gulf Stream. 



8. That there. is. evidence in the Mexican hieroglyphs, the inscrip- 

 tions and monuments of Palenque, Copan, and Uxmal (translated 

 by the Abbe Brasseur de Bourbourg, the last of which gives a com- 

 plete translation of the " Teo Amoxtli," the Toltecan mythological 

 history of the cataclysm of the Antilles), to prove that since the 

 occupation of Central America by man, the vast area of the Caribean 

 sea and the Gulf of Mexico, as far as the Antilles, has been sub- 

 merged. (In a carefully prepared map which accompanies Mr. 

 Catlin's work, he shows what he believes to have been the former 

 extent, within the human period, of the Central American Continent.) 



9. That the ruined cities of Yucatan and Guatemala with others 

 of equal or greater extent, were sunk beneath the Ocean. 



10. That the peninsulas of Yucatan and Guatemala, which were 

 submerged in the general cataclysm, have risen again, revealing the 

 ruins of the once splendid cities of Palenque and Uxmal — whose 

 walls still bear evidence of their submersion in fragments of coral 



