82 



ISLAND LIFE. 



[part I. 



find the oceans, from which the sediments came to form the 

 various deposits we now see. This view was held by so acute 

 and learned a geologist as Sir Charles Lyell, who says : — " Con- 

 tinents therefore, although permanent for w^hole geological 

 epochs, shift their positions entirely in the course of ages."^ Mr. 

 T. Mellard Reade, late President of the Geological Society of 

 Liverpool, so recently as 1878, says : — " While believing that the 

 ocean-depths are of enormous age, it is impossible to resist 

 other evidences that they have once been land. The very con- 

 tinuity of animal and vegetable life on the globe points to it. 

 The molluscous fauna of the eastern coast of North America is 

 very similar to that of Europe, and this could not have happened 

 without littoral continuity, yet there are depths of 1,500 fathoms 

 between these continents."^ It is certainly strange that a 

 geologist should not remember the recent and long-continued 

 warm climates of the Arctic regions, and see that a connection 

 of Northern Europe by Iceland with Greenland and Labrador 

 over a sea far less than a thousand fathoms deep would furnish 

 the " littoral continuity " required. Again, in the same pamphlet 

 Mr. Reade says : — " It can be mathematically demonstrated that 

 the whole, or nearly the whole, of the sea-bottom has been at 

 one time or other dry land. If it were not so, and the oscilla- 

 tions of the level of the land with respect to the sea were con- 

 fined within limits near the present continents, the results would 

 have been a gradual diminution instead of development of the 

 calcareous rocks. To state the case in common language, the 

 calcareous portion of the rocks would have been washed out 

 during the mutations, the destruction and re-deposit of the con 

 tinental rocks, and eventually deposited in the depths of the 

 immutable sea far from land. Immense beds of limestone would 

 now exist at the bottom of the ocean, while the land would be 

 composed of sandstones and argillaceous shales. The evidence 

 of chemistry thus confirms the inductions drawn from the 

 distribution of animal life upon theglobe." 



So far from this being a " mathematical demonstration " it 

 appears to me to be a complete misinterpretation of the facts. 



1 Principles of Geology, 11th Ed., Vol. I., p. 258. 



2 On Limestone as an Index of Geological Time. 



