THE BOSTON SUNDAY GLOBE-SUNDAl 
lOlE REVEALS ATLANm 
Discovery of a Little * 'Opossum Rat" in South 
America Proves That a Continent Once 
Stretched Across the Pole to Australia. 
The famous fable tells us how the 
mountain brought forth a mouse, but 
even the imagination of old -<Esop could 
not have suggested that a mouse might 
bring forth a mountain. Yet modern 
science has now assured us that this 
miracle has been surpassed in point of 
actual fact, for a mouse has brought 
forth, not a mountain merely, but a 
continent. 
At any rate, the mouse has revealed 
the former existence of a continent, 
where no land has been above the water 
within the memory of men. 
Moreover, the newly found land has a 
peculiar interest, for it is probably none 
other than the long-lost Atlantis, fabled 
in tradition. Many nations have chron- 
icled the existence of such a land, and 
philosophers, from Plato to Ignatius 
i Donnelly, have vainly puzzled their 
I heads over its location. And now a 
' mouse reveals the secret which the phi- 
losophers could not fathom. 
An amateur naturalist, while hunting 
In South America, chanced to hear the 
natives speak of a very rare species of 
mouse, which, according to their ac- 
count, lives in high crush wood, and 
feeds on birds' eggs, and which they 
reader this at once suggests a puzzling 
question: How could a little marsupial 
adapted for life in tropical or temper- 
ate zones make its way across a polar 
continent, even were the continent avail- 
able? 
To the geologist, however, this ques- 
tion presents no difficulties. At the 
time when the ancestors of our little 
Oaenolestes made their way across An- 
tarctica, it was a polar ooaitinent, but it 
had not what we now consider a polar 
climate. It is well known from evidence 
given by fossils, that the polar regions 
once had the climate of temperate, or 
even of sub tropical zones of today. 
In relatively recent times the Antarc- 
tic region may have had a climate mak- 
ing it a suitable habitation for creatures 
that now are forced to confine them- 
selves many degrees nearer the equa- 
tor. In this day it was that little Caen- 
olestes came across the bridge from 
Australia to South America. 
He did not burn the bridge behind 
him, but the bridge itself presently sank 
beneath the ocean, cutting ofC the re- 
treat just as effectually. 
The opossums, long residents of the 
western hemisphere, are also marsupi- 
als, and though they have not the pecu- 
liar dentition that marks first-cousin- 
ship with the Australian branch, yet it 
seems certain that at some more remote 
