Page:Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization.djvu/338

328 summer and his winter, and he warms up his yurt; whereby they explain the veneration of the lightning."

In the geological theories of classical times, the inference from fossil shells found inland, high or low above the sea level, was commonly that the sea had once been there. Herodotus argues from the shells on the mountains in Egypt, and Xanthus from the fossil shells, like cockles and scallops, which he had seen far from the sea, that there had been sea in old times where the land had since been left dry. Eratosthenes notices the existence of quantities of oyster-shells and bits of wreck of sea- going ships near the temple of Ammon, far inland in Lybia, while Strabo expresses the opinion that this temple was once close to the sea, though since thrown inland by the retiring of the waters. Describing the region of Numidia farther west, Pomponius Mela relates that, "Inland and far enough from the coast (if the thing be credible) they tell that in a wondrous way the spines of fish, and fragments of murex and oyster-shells, stones worn in the ordinary manner by the waves and not differing from those of the sea, anchors fixed in the rocks, and other similar signs and vestiges of the sea that once spread to those places, exist and are found on the barren plains." So Ovid says in his remarkable statement of the Pythagorean doctrines,—

and argues thence that sea has been converted into land.

In the Chinese Encyclopædia from which I have already quoted two remarkable passages, an account is to be found bearing on the present subject. "Eastern Tartary.—In travelling from the shore of the Eastern Sea toward Che-lu, neither brooks nor ponds are met with in the country, although it is intersected by mountains and valleys. Nevertheless there are found in the sand very far away from the sea, oyster-shells and the shields of crabs. The tradition of the Mongols who inhabit the country is, that it has been said from time immemo-