18 
“THE NATURALIST IN NICARAGUA. 
Jan., 1889. 
5? 
It is impossible within the brief limits of these pages to 
clo justice to this beautiful volume, which abounds in observa¬ 
tions and generalisations most valuable on inorganic (1), 
organic (2), and super-organic (8) phenomena. We can only 
touch on a few of the most interesting matters recorded in the 
order above indicated. 
With regard to inorganic phenomena (1), we are, on the 
first page of the book, made acquainted with a typical 
instance of the rapidity which characterises some geological 
changes. The River San Juan receives the greater part 
of the drainage of Nicaragua and Costa Rica, and it is 
the outlet of the great lake Nicaragua into the Atlantic 
ocean. “ Twenty years ago the main body of water ran past 
Greytown (San Juan del Norte); there was then a magnificent 
port, and large ships sailed up to the town, but for several 
years past the Colorado branch has been taking away more 
and more of its waters, and the port of Greytown has in con¬ 
sequence silted up. All ships now have to lie outside, and a 
shallow and, in heavy weather, a dangerous bar has to be 
crossed.” Evidences of glacial action were traceable at San 
Rafael—boulder clay extended for miles, “ and the angular 
and sub-angular stones that it contained were an irregular 
mixture of different varieties of trap, conglomerate, and 
schistose rocks;” but the author was “unprepared to believe 
that the glacial period could have left such a memorial of its 
existence within the tropics at no greater elevation above the 
sea than 3,000 feet.” And again: “The evidences of glacial 
action between Depilto and Ocotal were, with one exception 
(that of striation, not always preserved), as clear as in any 
Welsh or Highland valley. There were the same rounded 
and smoothed rock surfaces, the same moraine - like 
accumulations of unstratified sand and gravel, the same 
transported boulders that could be traced to their parent rocks 
several miles distant.” The author evidentlv believed in the 
t/ 
existence of the fabled continent of Atlantis. Approaching 
the subject from the side of Natural History, he was driven 
to look for a refuge for the animals and plants of tropical 
America during the glacial period, when he found proofs that 
the land they now occupy was at that time either covered with 
ice, or too cold for genera that can now only live where frost 
is unknown. He had arrived at the conclusion that they must 
have inhabited lowlands now submerged, and, pursuing the 
subject still further, “ he saw that all over the world curious 
questions concerning the distribution of races of mankind, of 
animals, and of plants, were rendered more easy of solution, 
on the theory that land was more continuous once than now; 
