190 H. B. GUPPY_, M.B., F.E.S.E.^ ON PLANT-DlSTiaBUTlOX 



De Maillet and Celsius. Sonie of the wildest guesses of De 

 Maillet have been perilously approached by modern philoso- 

 phers.* For him all organisms were originally marine, their 

 further development proceeding as the land emerged through 

 the lowering of the sea level by evaporation. Although such a 

 view may appear anticpiated and absurd, the doctrine implied 

 need not be condemned because we disapprove of the explan- 

 ation of the lowering of the sea. It will appear later on in this 

 paper, tliat as regards the origin of the vegetation of the earliest 

 land surface, the principle there involved is an accepted 

 doctrine of to-day. In recent years " the theory of desiccation," 

 as it is termed by Suess, figures conspicuously in the story of 

 the end of the world by Flammarion, tlie distinguished French 

 astronomer.f For that brilliant writer, this planet is essentially 

 a desiccating w^orld. As the primitive heat is lost in space, the 

 waters penetrate farther and larther into the earth's mass, being 

 locked up in various combinations (chemical and mechanical), 

 and the world dries up. 



Evidence of the progressive desiccation of the earth during 

 and since Tertiary times is displayed in all the large continental 

 areas. We find its later effects in the desert areas of Asia, 

 Africa, the two Americas, and Australia. Prince Krapotldii 

 has advocated the view that in recent geological times, and 

 indeed down to our own day, the earth has been passing through 

 an age of desiccation. He points to AsiaJ as a continent that 

 has long been drying up. As indicated by the evidence of its 

 sea borders, it is experiencing, he says, a rapid movement r)£ 

 emergence ; whilst the great lake systems that once occupied 

 its interior have mainly disappeared. One can learn much 

 from the pages devoted by ^Suess to the origin of Lake Baikal, 

 of the numberless fresii-water lakes that in Tertiary times 

 covered a greater part of northern Asia, but have now dried up, 

 and we can read there also of the niore ancient seas whose place 

 they occupied. A large part of the Tertiaiy deposits of the 

 world are lacustrine. * The Tertiary has even been called the 



* In the pages devoted to De Maillet by Quatrefages in his hook 

 Charles Darv-in et ses pre'rurse^i.rs tran^uis (chap, i, 1870), ^ve liiul tliat he 

 held, but iu another shaj)e, the view implied in the now familiar sentence, 

 " the moss-gvown fragments from the ruins of another world." 



t La Fin du Mondr, Paris, 1894. 



X (Jcogra'p/dcal Journal, Fehi-uary and March, 1004 ; see also liis 

 articles on Russia, Siberia, Turkestan, A olga, etc., in Encyclopaedia 

 Britannica. 



