6 Transactions, — Miscellaneous. 



Under certain circumstances, as Sir Charles Lyell says, tlie great 

 Enaliosanrians might re-appear in the ocean depths and their dragou-hke 

 congeners invade the lands, and soar above the forests, for from whence 

 they came, from whom descended, there are no records to tell. 



They appeared on earth when cosmical conditions were suitable, and 

 disappeared utterly, it is presumed, when these were changed, leaving no 

 transitional links behind that we know of. 



In the present century thousands are ready to accept any new idea, 

 however preposterous, propounded by the class who come under the 

 denomination of " advanced thinkers," who so often evince utter contempt 

 for the axiom of Mr. Huxley himself, that " the first duty of a hypothesis 

 is to be intelligible." 



It seems strange, nevertheless, that so startling a one as this Narrow 

 Zone, walled round with solid ice, the withdrawal for thousands of years of 

 solar heat from the greater portion of the globe, when the vivifying rays 

 had ceased to warm the seas, and ocean circulation came to a stand — for 

 this must be the inference — should be accepted with more readiness than 

 the idea of the Noachian Deluge ; when, according to Cuvier, there 

 remained only " Narrow regions, from ivJdch man re-ioeopled the earth after 

 those stupendous events which closed the Elephantine period." Those events 

 which took place when the long, slowly sinking Equatorial Continent — the 

 Lhanka of the Brahmins, the Lemuria of modern savans, a ma^i of 

 which is placed before us by Professor Haeckel, where he says man was 

 developed from perfected apes, a hundred thousand years ago, in Pliocene 

 times, perhaps hundreds of thousands in Miocene, was at last suddenly 

 submerged, during a period of intense volcanic activity, when its founda- 

 tions were taken away, and other regions were upheaved in its place. 



This cataclysmal catastrophe in consonance with Mosaic history, in 

 consonance with the traditions of men of all races, Caucasian, Mongohan, 

 Polynesian, or Negroid, presents none of the extraordinary difficulties which 

 surround the Glacial Hypothesis as thus put before us. 



It was a catastrophe affecting a limited area, enormous as compared 

 with that which subsided during the earthquakes of 1819. — The Eunn of 

 Cutch, from similar causes acting upon an infinitely smaller scale than 

 they once did in the adjacent regions — ^but small when contrasted with that 

 over which we are told life was extinguished by a universal ice-cap. The 

 general order of things when the portion of the world known to the 

 advanced families of men, possibly to all the human race, was overwhelmed 

 by the sea, still went on undisturbed, it may be presumed, elsewhere. The 

 giant sloths and armadillos may have moved about on the savannahs of 

 South America, and the great marsupials— the gigantic wombats, kangaroos, 



