50 
POPULAE SCIENCE REVIEW, 
of Leucadia and the mainland of Greece. Receiving the drainage of a 
considerable tract of land, much of it hilly, the heavy rains that occasionally 
fall carry into it a good deal of silt ; and marine currents coming in, either 
from north or south, help to increase the deposit which is rapidly forming 
and hardening at the head of this gulf. Unless interfered with from without, 
the whole tends, ultimately, to form a wide tract of dry land. The narrow 
passage near Teki Castle does not tend to become deeper ; and, indeed, the 
water is already so shallow there that it can easily be waded across. The 
passage at Fort Alexander is both wider and deeper, but still has no 
tendency to check but rather increases the deposits within the present area 
of shallow water. The completion of the ship canal, if successful, might 
slightly check the filling up of the lagoon. # 
The existence at present of this curious condition of a large 
island so very nearly connected with the mainland by a 
channel apparently tending to choke up rather than to widen, 
is the more interesting because in two cases in which it is 
alluded to by writers of antiquity, it is described as then 
actually a peninsula. Thus, Homer describes it as “ the penin- 
sula of Epirus,” while Livy, describing the seige of Lencas by 
the Romans about two hundred years before the birth of 
Christ, speaks of it as in his time an island, but at the time of 
the siege a peninsula. 
Notwithstanding this, there is the best reason for supposing 
that the water way, such as it is, has always existed. Homer 
might well call it a peninsula, if the intervening water could 
be waded across on foot, and Livy may have misunderstood 
his informants for a similar reason. Certainly, there is no 
present appearance of there having been a separation, either 
natural or artificial, within the historic period. That the whole 
district is subject to occasional earthquake action is undoubted, 
and it might be supposed that on one of these occasions some 
small depression has occurred, lowering, by a few feet, a tongue 
of land like that which still forms the margin of the lagoon to the 
north. Such an event as a small depression might detach 
Gibraltar from Spain in a similar way. But a sinking of this 
kind cannot have affected only a part of the long narrow strip, 
all of which is in the same state. A depression now of a few 
feet would not only lay open the whole lagoon to the sea, but 
cover most of the plain on which are the town of Santa Maura 
and all the rich olive-groves adjacent, nearly to the foot of the 
hills. A depression of five feet would leave hardly anything. 
On the other hand, all these plains and the margin of the lagoon 
are strictly alluvial, the plains being chiefly river alluvium, and 
the margin entirely marine alluvium. Had the whole been 
originally and during the historic period five feet higher, there 
* An.stcd’s “ Ionian Islands,” p. 133, 
