Mr. A. R. Wallace, in his Malay Archipelago, arrives at the following conclusion after a review of the mass of evidence at hand:
The inference that we must draw from these facts is undoubtedly that the whole of the islands eastwards beyond Java and Borneo do essentially form a part of a former Australian or Pacific Continent, although some of them may never have been actually joined to it. This continent must have been broken up not only before the Western Islands were separated from Asia, but probably before the extreme south-eastern portion of Asia was raised above the waters of the ocean, for a great part of the land of Borneo and Java is known to be geologically of quite recent formation.[1846]
According to Hæckel:
Probably Southern Asia itself was not the earliest cradle of the human race; but Lemuria, a continent that lay to the South of Asia, and sank later on beneath the surface of the Indian Ocean.[1847]
In one sense Hæckel is right as to Lemuria—the “cradle of the human race.” That Continent was the home of the first physical human stock—the later Third-Race Men. Previous to that epoch the Races were far less consolidated and physiologically quite different. Hæckel makes Lemuria extend from Sunda Island to Africa and Madagascar and eastwards to Upper India.
Professor Rütimeyer, the eminent Palæontologist, asks:
Need the conjecture that the almost exclusively graminivorous and insectivorous marsupials, sloths, armadilloes, ant-eaters and ostriches, once possessed an actual point of union in a Southern Continent of which the present flora of Terra del Fuego and Australia must be the remains—need this conjecture raise difficulties at [pg 834]a moment when, from their fossil remains, Heer restores to our sight the ancient forests of Smith's Sound and Spitzbergen?[1848]
Having now dealt generally with the broad scientific attitude on the two questions, it will, perhaps, conduce to an agreeable brevity, if we sum up the more striking isolated facts in favour of that fundamental contention of Esoteric Ethnologists—the reality of Atlantis. Lemuria is so widely accepted, that further pursuit of the subject is unnecessary. With regard, however, to the former, it is found that:
(1) The Miocene floræ of Europe have their most numerous and striking analogues in the floræ of the United States. In the forests of Virginia and Florida are found the magnolias, tulip-trees, evergreen oaks, plane trees, etc., which correspond with European Tertiary flora, term for term. How was the migration effected, if we exclude the theory of an Atlantic Continent bridging the ocean between America and Europe? The proposed “explanation” to the effect that the transition was by way of Asia and the Aleutian Islands is a mere uncalled-for theory, obviously upset by the fact that a large number of these floræ only appear East of the Rocky Mountains. This also negatives the idea of a Trans-Pacific migration. They are now superseded by European continents and islands to the North.
(2) Skulls exhumed on the banks of the Danube and Rhine bear a striking similarity to those of the Caribs and Old Peruvians (Littré). Monuments have been exhumed in Central America, which bear representations of undoubted negro heads and faces. How are such facts to be accounted for except on the Atlantean hypothesis? What is now N.W. Africa was once connected with Atlantis by a network of islands, few of which now remain.