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 whole geological 
epochs, shift their positions entirely in the course of ages.” 1 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.” 2 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., Yol. I., p. 258. 
2 On Limestone as an Index of Geological Time. 
