Page:Transactions NZ Institute Volume 10.djvu/30

6 Under certain circumstances, as Sir Charles Lyell says, the great Enaliosaurians might re-appear in the ocean depths and their dragon-like congeners invade the lands, and soar above the forests, for from whence they came, from whom descended, there are no records to tell.

They appeared on earth when cosmical conditions were suitable, and disappeared utterly, it is presumed, when these were changed, leaving no transitional links behind that we know of.

In the present century thousands are ready to accept any new idea, however preposterous, propounded by the class who come under the denomination of "advanced thinkers," who so often evince utter contempt for the axiom of Mr. Huxley himself, that "the first duty of a hypothesis is to be intelligible."

It seems strange, nevertheless, that so startling a one as this Narrow Zone, walled round with solid ice, the withdrawal for thousands of years of solar heat from the greater portion of the globe, when the vivifying rays had ceased to warm the seas, and ocean circulation came to a stand—for this must be the inference—should be accepted with more readiness than the idea of the Noachian Deluge; when, according to Cuvier, there remained only "Narrow regions, from which man re-peopled the earth after those stupendous events which closed the Elephantine period." Those events which took place when the long, slowly sinking Equatorial Continent—the Lhanka of the Brahmins, the Lemuria of modern savans, a map of which is placed before us by Professor Haëckel, where he says man was developed from perfected apes, a hundred thousand years ago, in Pliocene times, perhaps hundreds of thousands in Miocene, was at last suddenly submerged, during a period of intense volcanic activity, when its foundations were taken away, and other regions were upheaved in its place.

This cataclysmal catastrophe in consonance with Mosaic history, in consonance with the traditions of men of all races, Caucasian, Mongohan, Polynesian, or Negroid, presents none of the extraordinary difficulties which surround the Glacial Hypothesis as thus put before us.

It was a catastrophe affecting a limited area, enormous as compared with that which subsided during the earthquakes of 1819.—The Eunn of Cutch, from similar causes acting upon an infinitely smaller scale than they once did in the adjacent regions—but small when contrasted with that over which we are told life was extinguished by a universal ice-cap. The general order of things when the portion of the world known to the advanced families of men, possibly to all the human race, was overwhelmed by the sea, still went on undisturbed, it may be presumed, elsewhere. The giant sloths and armadillos may have moved about on the savannahs of South America, and the great marsupials—the gigantic wombats, kangaroos,