100 Froceedings of the Royal Irkli Academy. 



hand, and into Europe on the other. The 500 fttthom line indicates 

 the probable coast line during both Eocene and Miocene, and the rapid 

 increase of depth in the Atlantic to its ^est Avonld alIo?r of a consider- 

 able depression taking place mthout altering in any important degree 

 the position of the sea margia. 



(p. 44. ^ — " Professor Heer places his ' Atlantis' to the south-^^ivest 

 of the line represented in the map (fig. 6), but the enormous depth 

 of the ]S^orth Atlantic renders it very improbable that there was diy 

 land in that region at a time, geologically speaking, so recent as the 

 Miocene Age " (reference will be again made to this remark further on). 



" The principal mountains in the British Isles were in their present 

 positions in the Miocene Age, but were considerably higher, (probably) 

 double what they are now." 



As bearing on the fact of the former extension of the land to 

 America and towards the north-east of Europe it is of interest to cite 

 the following note on the ''Eeport of Messrs. Xewton and Teall on the 

 Lava sheets of Franz-Josef Land" fi'om Nature, vol. 57 (Xov. '97 to 

 April '98), p. 324 : " The immense lava sheets that cover an area of 

 some 200,000 square miles in the Deccan of India have been looked 

 upon as the greatest examples of Yulcanism in the world, but an even 

 more extensive outpouring of similar material must formerly have been 

 evident in the northern hemisphere if we can accept the conclusions 

 reached by Messrs. Xewton and Teall from a study of the geological 

 collections made in Eranz-Josef Land by the Jackson-Hannsworth 

 Expedition (see Quart. Journal Geolog. Soc. December, 1897). That 

 Archipelago is formed of the fi'agments of an ancient basalt plateau 

 which must have stretched far beyond its present limits. Similar 

 igneous rocks are found in Spitzbergen, Jan Mayen, Iceland, Green- 

 land, the Faroes, the Hebrides, and north Ireland ; and the authors are 

 inclined to regard all these areas as the isolated fragments of a formerly 

 continuous land area, the greatest part of which has sunk to form the 

 northern portion of the I!^orth Atlantic Ocean. The period of this 

 outpom-ing was probably the end of the Cretaceous and beginning of 

 Tertiary times. The period seems to have been distinguished by similar 

 occurrences in other parts of the world, for the great lava flows of thfr 

 Deccan and of Abyssinia are of the same age." " In Auvergne, in the 

 Miocene Period, the volcanoes burst through the granitic and gneissose 

 plateau of centi'al France " (Geikie, " Text-book of Geology" (1893), 

 p. 203). 



(p. 66.) — Boyd Dawkins says : "There is no proof of the presence 

 of man in Europe dui^ing the Miocene Age." 



