FIRE, ROCK, AND SEA 25 



nent. It is possible that Europe and Asia, on the eastern banks 

 of the Ocean River, were joined together with Africa, when 

 the Mediterranean Sea did not yet exist. From Europe an ex- 

 tension of the continent stood in the place of the present 

 shallow sea between the British Isles and Greenland; this is 

 called Atlantida. 



During the next 150 million years of the Paleozoic era the 

 steady action of wind and water wore down the mountains, 

 and the continental blocks of granite once more sank back 

 into the plastic basalt beneath them. The North Atlantic 

 Ocean again spread itself over its borders. Though the Medi- 

 terranean Sea did not appear in its present site, a sort of vast 

 ancestral Mediterranean, the great shallow Sea of Tethys, 

 spread over an enormous area between the higher lands of 

 Africa and northern Asia as far east as China and the present 

 site of the Himalayas. On the opposite side of the Atlantic, 

 the ancient American Gulf, well to the northward of the pres- 

 ent Gulf of Mexico, flooded the middle of continental North 

 America and reached into Canada. To the south its surf broke 

 upon the land we call Llanoria — southern Texas, Mexico, and 

 the present Gulf of Mexico. The eastern shore of the Gulf was 

 the land of Appalachia, spreading beyond the present Atlantic 

 shores to the edge of the continental shelf; while its western 

 boundary was Cascadia, an ancient land which extended hun- 

 dreds of miles out into the Pacific Ocean beyond what is now 

 the west coast of America. 



Part of the Ocean River at that far distant time may have 

 flowed through the ancestral Gulf of Mexico into the Arctic 

 Sea, and thus have brought warmth to the far northern lands. 

 There is confirmation of this in the strange fact that fossils of 

 temperate and even subtropical life have been found in Alaska 

 and Greenland, though this may be partly due to movements 

 of the earth's axis of rotation and therefore of its poles. 

 Branches of the Ocean River may also have joined the Pacific 



