Between Madagascar and India are a number of submerged banks of less than one thousand fathoms deep, which a slight elevation would make comparative easy stages of communication between Madagascar and India for all animals. An elevation of three hundred feet would unite Java, Sumatra and Borneo into one great peninsula of the Asiatic continent.
The Island of Madagascar is two hundred and fifty miles wide and one thousand miles long, and is separated from Africa by the Mozambique Channel, only two hundred and fifty miles wide. Africa has monkeys, apes, and baboons; also lions, leopards, hyenas, zebras, rhinocerii, elephants, buffaloes, giraffes, and many species of deer and antelopes; but strange to say, not one of these animals is found in Madagascar, or anything like them. There are in Madagascar, according to Wallace’s “Island Life,” and Dr. Hartlaub’s “Birds of Madagascar,” one hundred species of land birds, and only four or five have any kindred in Africa; but in Malaysia and India we find identical species, and on the islands of Mauritius, Rodriguez, Bourbon and the Seychelles group we find so many curious birds without wings, with similar kindred in Madagascar, that we know these islands have been connected.
The Seychelles group, two hundred by three hundred miles in extent, are seven hundred miles northeast from Madagascar, and have fifteen peculiar species of birds, while three of them are found in Madagascar, and some have kindred in India.
There are five species of lizards which are found in Mauritius, Bourbon, Rodriguez and Ceylon, and even to the Philippine Islands.
The Mascarene group contains one thousand and fifty-eight species of plants, of which sixty-six are found in Africa but not in Asia, and eighty-six are found in Asia and not in Africa, showing a closer relation to Asia than to Africa. Milne-Edwards has even surmised a “Mascarene” continent, to include all the outlying islands around Madagascar. Beccari, in his work on the geographical distribution of palms, after noting the difficulties of the dispersion of the fruits, reaches the conclusion that, when we find two congeneric species of palms on widely separated lands, it is reasonable to infer that these lands have been united. On the Mascarene Islands, in Ceylon, the Nicobars, at Singapore, on the Malaccas, New Guinea, in Australia and Polynesia occur various species of Phychosperma, all very difficult of dissemination, and hence could have reached their present habitat only by being connected by intervening lands now in the ocean bed. Winchell, in his “Pre-Adamites,” states among his principles: 1st, The doctrine of pre-Adamites is entirely consonant with the fundamental principles of Biblical Christianity; 2d, A chain of profound relationship runs through the constitution of all races, and they may be regarded as genealogically connected together; 3d, The initial point of the genealogical line may be located in Lemuria.
Peschell, in his “Races of Man,” says: “This continent, which would correspond with the Indian Ethiopia of Claudius Ptolemæus, is required by anthropology, for we can then conceive how the inferior populations of Australia and India, the Papuans of the East India Islands, and lastly the Negroes, would thus be enabled to reach their present abode by dry land.” The selection of this spot is far more orthodox than it might at the first glance appear, for we here find ourselves in the neighborhood of the four enigmatical rivers of the scriptural Eden—in the vicinity of the Nile, Euphrates, Tigris and Indus. By the gradual submergence of Lemuria, the expulsion from Paradise would also be inexorably accomplished. To this he adds the arguments of such ecclesiastical writers as Lactantius, the venerable Bede, Hrabanus Maurus, Cosmas Indicopleustes and the anonymous geographer of Ravenna. In the second chapter of Genesis we read: “A river went out of Eden to water the garden, and from thence it was parted and came into four heads.” Whether such a river exists to-day, I know not. Dr. McCausland, in his “Adam and Adamite,” believes that Eden was on the west bank of the modern Euphrates, near the Persian Gulf. He says the Pison river of Genesis, in conjunction with the modern Karùn, is the Pasitigris of the ancients, which runs through the country of Evilat or Havillah, and flows into the Euphrates before it falls into the Persian Gulf. The second is the modern Karashú, the Gyndes of the ancients, which traverses the land of Cush. The Hiddekel is plainly the Tigris, and is designated in Daniel x. 4, and runs westward to Assyria.
We know by the remains of sea-shells that the Great Desert of Sahara was once the bottom of the ocean, and its elevation may have been consonant with and the direct cause of the submergence of Lemuria.
Alfred Wallace says none but the unscientific have revived Atlantis since Darwin’s “Origin of Species” and Prof. Asa Grey on “The Affinity of North American and Asiatic Floras.” It is not my desire to pose as unscientific, nor to construct a highway for the Polearctic or Nearctic fauna and flora, but to prove that the anthropological and ethnological affinities of the Nahuatl tribes deserve a newer and better classification; and if the restoration of Atlantis will accomplish that end, then let the theory stand or fall on its merits.
If Lemuria can be established by affinity, why not accept as much of such collateral evidence concerning Atlantis as is compatible with science.
The Pacific Ocean is not stormy. Winchell says South America was peopled by Mongoloids from the Polynesian Islands. Since no storms prevail there, the theory would indicate a design on the inhabitants to seek new shores, which lay so many hundred miles away, across a sea where storms would never carry them by accident; but in the peopling of Central America from the East, the stormy Atlantic and unvarying trade winds would carry any unwary voyager who strayed too far from shore. As to the establishing of scientific data in support of Atlantis, I have to add that it is probably a short while before the acceptance will be as universal as Lemuria.