There is nothing, so far as I am aware, in the biological or geological evidence at present accessible, to render untenable the hypothesis that an area of the Mid-Atlantic or Pacific sea-bed as big as Europe, should have been upheaved as high as Mont Blanc, and have subsided again any time since the Palæozoic epoch, if there were any grounds for entertaining it.[1828]
That is to say, then, that there is nothing to militate against positive evidence of the fact; nothing, therefore, against the geological postulates of the Esoteric Philosophy. Dr. Berthold Seemann assures us in the Popular Science Review that:
The facts which botanists have accumulated for reconstructing these lost maps of the globe are rather comprehensive; and they have not been backward in demonstrating the former existence of several large tracts of solid land in parts now occupied by great oceans. The many striking points of contact between the present floras of the United States and Eastern Asia, induced them to assume that, during the present order of things, there existed a continental connection between South-Eastern Asia and Western America. The singular correspondence of the present flora of the Southern United States with that of the lignite flora of Europe induces them to believe that, in the Miocene period, Europe and America were connected by a land passage, of which Iceland, Madeira, and the other Atlantic islands are remnants; that, in fact, the story of an Atlantis, which an Egyptian priest told to Solon, is not purely fictitious, but rests upon a solid historical basis.... Europe of the Eocene period received the plants which spread over mountains and plains, valleys and river-banks (from Asia generally), neither exclusively from the South nor from the East. The West also furnished additions, and if at that period these were rather meagre, they show, at all events, that the bridge was already building, which, at a later period, was to facilitate communication between the two [pg 826]continents in such a remarkable manner. At that time some plants of the Western Continent began to reach Europe by means of the island of Atlantis, then probably just [?] just rising above the ocean.[1829]
And in another number of the same review[1830] Mr. W. Duppa Crotch, M.A., F.L.S., in an article entitled “The Norwegian Lemming and its Migrations,” alludes to the same subject:
Is it probable that land could have existed where now the broad Atlantic rolls? All tradition says so: old Egyptian records speak of Atlantis, as Strabo and others have told us. The Sahara itself is the sand of an ancient sea, and the shells which are found upon its surface prove that, no longer ago than the Miocene period, a sea rolled over what is now desert. The voyage of the “Challenger” has proved the existence of three long ridges[1831] in the Atlantic Ocean,[1832] one extending for more than three thousand miles, and lateral spurs may, by connecting these ridges, account for the marvellous similarity of the fauna of the Atlantic islands.[1833]...
The submerged continent of Lemuria, in what is now the Indian Ocean, is considered to afford an explanation of many difficulties in the distribution of organic life, and, I think, the existence of a Miocene Atlantis will be found to have a strong elucidative bearing on subjects of greater interest [truly so!] than the migration of the lemming. At all events, if it can be shown that land existed in former ages where the North Atlantic now rolls, not only is a motive found for these apparently suicidal migrations, but also a strong collateral proof that what we call instincts are but the blind and sometimes even prejudicial inheritance of previously acquired experience.
At certain periods, we learn, multitudes of these animals swim to sea and perish. Coming, as they do, from all parts of Norway, the powerful instinct which survives throughout ages as an inheritance from their progenitors impels them to seek a continent, once existing but now submerged beneath the ocean, and to court a watery grave.
In an article containing a criticism of Mr. A. R. Wallace's [pg 827] Island Life—a work devoted largely to the question of the distribution of animals, etc.—Mr. Starkie Gardiner writes:
By a process of reasoning supported by a large array of facts of different kinds, he arrives at the conclusion that the distribution of life upon the land as we now see it has been accomplished without the aid of important changes in the relative positions of continents and seas. Yet if we accept his views, we must believe that Asia and Africa, Madagascar and Africa, New Zealand and Australia, Europe and America, have been united at some period not remote geologically, and that seas to the depth of 1,000 fathoms have been bridged over; but we must treat as “utterly gratuitous and entirely opposed to all the evidences at our command” [! !], the supposition that temperate Europe and temperate America, Australia, and South America, have ever been connected, except by way of the Arctic or Antarctic Circles, and that lands now separated by seas of more than 1,000 fathoms depth have ever been united.
Mr. Wallace, it must be admitted, has succeeded in explaining the chief features of existing life distribution, without bridging the Atlantic or Pacific, except towards the Poles, yet I cannot help thinking that some of the facts might perhaps be more easily explained by admitting the former existence of the connection between the coast of Chili and Polynesia[1834] and Great Britain and Florida, shadowed by the sub-marine banks which stretch between them. Nothing is urged that renders these more direct connections impossible, and no physical reason is advanced why the floor of the ocean should not be upheaved from any depth. The route by which [according to the Anti-Atlantean and Lemurian hypotheses of Wallace] the floras of South America and Australia are supposed to have mingled, is beset by almost insurmountable obstacles, and the apparently sudden arrival of a number of subtropical American plants in our Eocenes necessitates a connection more to the South than the present 1,000 fathom line. Forces are unceasingly acting, and there is no reason why an elevating force once set in action in the centre of an ocean should cease to act until a continent is formed. They have acted and lifted out from the sea, in comparatively recent geological time, the loftiest mountains on earth. Mr. Wallace himself admits repeatedly that sea-beds have been elevated 1,000 fathoms, and islands have risen up from the depths of 3,000 fathoms; and to suppose that the upheaving forces are limited in power, is, it seems to me, to again quote from Island Life, “utterly gratuitous and entirely opposed to all the evidences at our command.”[1835]