4 INTRODUCTORY 



Madagascar and South Africa, and separated from the 

 present heart of Asia by a deep channel — a channel 

 perhaps traversed, much as now the West Indies 

 traverse the Caribbean, by a series of islands, which 

 may have been lowly precursors of the Himalayas ; for 

 these gigantic mountains are of quite recent origin. 

 Through this Himalayan channel the tides may have 

 swept westwards into a northward extension of the 

 Arabian Sea, and so on, through a wide-spread 

 Mediterranean — a Mediterranean beneath whose 

 waters all the ancient monarchies and all the origins 

 of our civilisation lay, still undreamt-of — into the 

 Atlantic, the condition of Asia Minor and of Middle 

 and Southern Europe being then one of 



" Universal Ocean, softly washing all her warless isles." 



To my mind there is something very stirring in 

 the thought that, somewhere near where now the Salt 

 Range rises out of the silent Punjab desert, there may 

 once have been heard the echoes of a sea whose 

 currents perhaps — like an eastern Gulf Stream — carried 

 warmth and comfort to northern latitudes, as if 

 prophetic of a returning tide of civilisation in after 

 ages.^ 



This, however, is merely speculation, and though 

 such speculations may perhaps rouse the imagination, 



As to the possibility of currents from the Indian Ocean 

 having benignly influenced arctic climates in Tertiary times in the 

 way here suggested, see Wallace, Island Life^ p. i86. 



