292 PROCEEDINGS OF THE GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY. [May 22, 



relics would have been found in some degree commingled in these 

 caverns. 



This was a point I felt it especially necessary to notice when the 

 remains of this remarkable little species of extinct Elephant were 

 exhibited by the late Dr. Falconer and myself, in 1862, at the 

 Cambridge Meeting of the British Association. 



It therefore opens out the following questions : — What were the 

 times, and what were the special conditions of the locahty favouring 

 the existence of each large species of Mammalia ? one being so dis- 

 tinctly an amphibious animal, and moreover an animal peculiar to a 

 freshwater condition not now in any way indicated by the existing 

 climate and region ; and the other an animal exclusively of the 

 forest and land, and thus indicating the existence, at one time, of a 

 very proximate, if not entire connexion of Malta with Europe and 

 Africa, by land that must have existed to serve as a highway of 

 migration between them, but which has since subsided beneath the 

 Mediterranean. 



These submerged lands are really now indicated by the bank 

 called the " Adventure Bank," discovered by Admiral Smyth, be- 

 tween Tunis and the north-west part of Sicily, as one, and no 

 doubt the most important, highway of migration of these extinct 

 animals, and also by another bank, which we found soon after the 

 discovery of the Elephant Cavern of Zebbug, as a well-defined, but 

 more deeply submerged, ridge, connecting the south-eastern end of 

 Malta with Tripoli, and which I have named the " Medina Bank," 

 after my ship, ' The Medina.' 



So that if we were to have an upheaval of about 250 fathoms of 

 the whole sea-bed of the Malta channel, we should have both these 

 banks or ridges dry land, with the exception of a narrow channel 

 through each, that would not be impassable to either animal at the 

 seasonable times for migration ; and Malta would be connected with 

 Sicily, and Sicily with Italy, but with a deep, steep-sided and 

 enclosed sea lying between these upraised banks, viz. between 

 Sicily, Malta, Tunis, and Tripoli, with the extinct volcanos of Linosa 

 Island and Graham's Shoal on either side of the basin, to show that 

 its somewhat crater-like form, as it would then appear, from the 

 abruptness of its sides, was really due to proximate volcanic up- 

 heaval and downcast, and that this was a basin to account for the 

 origin of which a glacial excavation is not necessary, as seems to 

 be the creed of some geologists regarding the greater part of such 

 deep depressions. 



And I am induced to add also, in respect to this supposed physical 

 change in the relative positions of land and sea, that it most pro- 

 bably existed at no very distant geological time, and that it bore a 

 remarkable resemblance to the Sea of Marmora, with its Bosphorus 

 and Dardanelles as straits connecting it with the Black Sea and 

 Mediterranean. Eor there would now remain, with an uplift of 250 

 fathoms of the entire Malta strait, a deep internal sea, nearly 200 

 miles long and 60 broad, and from 50 to 500 fathoms deep, and with 

 a narrow strait between the Adventure and Medina Banks, connect- 



