16 THE AUSTRALIAN NATURALIST. 
Mr. BE. C. Andrews in Funafuti and Fiji, are of great value in 
impressing us with the continental origin of many of the Pacific 
Islands as wellas the vastness of geological processes. By 
subsidence this contiuent of the Pacific has resolved itself into 
a group of islands. 
On botanical, zoological and paleontologic grounds we have 
reason to believe that Australia was once joined to Africa (via 
Haeckel’s Continent of Lemuria). Less disputable is the idea 
of a former, Tertiary, land connection between North Australia 
and Southern Asia and the Philippines. Of late years 
scientists have also found good reasons to believe that our 
continent has at one period been connected with South America 
across the South Pole by the continental mass we now call by 
Capt. Hutton’s name of * Ancient Antarctica.” 
Of still greater interest are Professor Hull’s bathymetrical 
researches, which show a great extension of the ‘“ British 
Platform” into the Atlantic Ocean in the Miocene period. 
Professor Hull shows that an elevation of 1,300 feet would 
almost connect Hurope with Iceland. The Icelandic flora 
proves an old land connection (Wallace). The submerged 
river, valleys and canyons which dissect the platform empty 
into the Atlantic at a depth of 9,000 feet. The platform ex- 
tended south as far as Portugal, and is cut by the submerged 
canyons of the Shannon, Erne, La Mauche, Loire Adour, 
Gironde, Lima, Ebro and Douro. Hull quotes these facts as 
evidence of an elevation of Western Europe by 9,000 feet in 
Bae times, and a resubsidence of equal magnitude. Professor, 
régger by a study of the distribution of the littoral fauna 
arrives at the sameconclusion. Recent strides by Scandinavian 
geologists and investigation of the kitchen-middens show that 
the Sound and the Belts were formed by an irruption of the 
sea while Neolithic man Jived in Scandinavia, and that in 
recent times the Baltic has become gradually fresher through 
a submarine elevatory movement south of the Gulf of Bothnia. 
Professor Hull’s researches are interesting as bringing further 
comfirmatory evidence of the existence of Atlantis, the now sub- 
merged continent round which many myths have been spun, 
An elevation of much less than that which Hull has demon- 
strated would render the Challenger and Dolphin Ridges terra 
jirma, and connect the Azores with Spain. Plato’s Poseidonis 
becomes no idle dream, and geology is at last in a position to 
support here, too, the evidence of Botany, Archeology, Ethno- 
logy, Tradition, and Poesy. It is surely not by mere chance 
that pyramids were fashioned in Central America as well as in 
Egypt; that the Phosnician, Egyptian and Mayan alphabets 
have many letters in common; that names like Atlante, Colima, 
etc., existed on both sides of the Atlantic before the time of 
Columbus, that “round towers,” elephant mounds and serpents 
