226 Canadian Record of Science. 



of the ocean seems to have remained, on the whole, abyssal, 

 hut there were probably periods when those shallow reaches 

 of the Atlantic which stretch across its most northern por- 

 tion, and partly separate it from the Arctic basin, presented 

 connecting coasts or continuous chains of islands sufficient 

 to permit animals and plants to pass over. 1 At certain 

 periods also there were, not unlikely, groups of volcanic 

 islands, like the Azores, in the temperate or tropical Atlantic. 

 More especially 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 Mediterranean, 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 

 pre-historic Atlantis. 2 



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 accumulating on the sea- 

 ward sides of the old Lauren tian ridges, and internal deposits 

 thinning away from these ridges over the submerged con- 

 tinental areas, and presenting dissimilar conditions of sedi- 

 mentation. 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 



1 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. 



2 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 ttie Iberian race, 

 which Dawkins connects with the Neolithic and Bronze ages of 

 archseology. My own attention has recently been directed, through 

 specimens presented to the McGill College Museum, by Mr. R. S. 

 Haliburton, to the remarkable resemblance in cranial characters, 

 wampum, and other particulars of the Guanches of the Canaries 

 with aborigines of Eastern America — resemblances which cannot be 

 accidental. 



