and two hundred and fifty feet deep, has been worn out by an agency which demands a century to render its results perceptible. The peninsula of Florida has been undergrown by a coral reef and added to the domain of the land. The delta of the Mississippi has taken the place of a broad estuary which penetrated deep into the heart of the land. There are those who would have us believe that even the monuments of human activity date back a thousand centuries, while the decline of the continental glacier, the extinction of the last fauna, the wastage of the pre-glacial surface of North America - these are events which stretch æons upon æons into the remoter past.

Now, let us gaze the ages steadily in the face. Let us see if it be impossible to take in the compass of a geological period. Let us seek for a unit of measure with which we may guage the cycles of terrestrial evolutions. Let us grope for a parallactic base-line of known dimensions, from which we may take the bearings of events gleaming down upon us from primeval time.

Not all great geologic events date back to a high antiquity. Here has been the first error in our premises. Man did not come upon a world in which history had closed. He came in the midst of the progress of events. Man himself was one in the series of events. Great vicissitudes preceded his coming; great vicissitudes have even followed his coming. We have thought that when man appeared the work of geologic agencies had been completed, and that his race was destined to contemplate things in a state of fixity, or moving in ever-repeated cycles; hence every momentous revolution in terrestrial affairs, of which we trace the records, must have antedated Adam. It must stretch back into remote antiquity. When, therefore, we discovered, as we must discover, that man had been the witness of vast geologic changes, we first, as

by an impulse, declared that man's existence mounts also to an antiquity measured by scores of thousands of years.

We have learned another lesson in the primer of science. The great tide of events which we have witnessed sweeping down through the ages of paleozoic and later geologic time, is now sweeping past our very eyes. It is the same tide; we ourselves are borne upon its bosom. In our brief day we may note a few of the vicissitudes which swell and perpetuate the current.

What man of adult years does not know some reedy bog which in his boyhood was a skating-pond? Who that has attained the years of grandsire has not seen meadow land in spots which he once knew as reedy bog? The alluvial meadow has grown from the reeking marsh; the marsh emerged from the shallow lake-bottom by the slow filling of the depression. The whole work is one within the grasp of human comprehension. But the little lake was a vestige of the last inundation of the ocean, which followed the glacial visitation. So the great glacier almost looms into view.

The traditions of the Greeks preserved the memory of an ancient submergence of the Scythian plains. The vast steppes of Russia and Siberia, like the prairies of the Mississippi Valley, were once the bottom of a shallow sea or lake. The obstructed outlet of the Black Sea damned the waters to such an altitude that the Black and Caspian and Aral were one, a greater Mediterranean spreading over the most fertile areas of the Orient-which were thus preparing, as the American prairies were at the same time preparing, to be come the garden of the continent to which they belong. This lacustrine region is the ancient Sectonia. In the progress of events, an earthquake throe shivered the barriers of the Thracian Bosphorus, and the Oriental prairie land was drained. The fable of the

floating Symplegades perpetuates the memory of the relative transpositions of land and water. History preserves no record of this great hydrographic revolution. It has been borne down to the reach of history by the lips of tradition, which ever delights to reproduce the marvels of the past. Here was a great geologic emergence of almost half a continent which our race stood by to witness.

There are indications not a few that the delta of the Nile and the entire desert of Sahara have been the bed of the Mediterranean within the human epoch. Aristotle refers to the growth of the Nilotic delta in his own times; and Strato and Strabo recognize the probability that it had been covered, in times not very remote, by the waters of the Mediterranean. The sands of the desert, as many travelers and geographers have suggested, are but the monuments of an ancient aqueous expanse, probably a wider Mediterranean sea. When recently drained, this ancient sea-bottom, like that of ancient Sectonia and Illinois, was a prairie soil, and supported a thrifty population during the life-time of a nation; but, like other continental surfaces which have fulfilled their part in the sustentation of a race, the Egyptian plains have deteriorated to a limit beneath the needs of civilization, and civilization has sought out fresher areas on which to continue its march.

The traditions of every nation preserve the memory of a widespread and destructive deluge. One such deluge transpired in the Orient, and swept off the contemporary populations. Our sacred records assert that "the waters prevailed upon the earth one hundred and fifty days," that they covered elevated mountains, and that all living creatures in the country (haarets, the whole region) perished. Berosus, the Chaldee historian, speaks of a universal deluge which occurred before the reign

of Belus. The sacred books of the Hindoos preserve the record of a great deluge which occurred about the time of the Mosaic flood. Confucius represents the Emperor Jas as exercising his authority or power in effecting the retreat of the waters of a Chinese deluge, which completely inundated the plains and lesser hills and washed the feet of the highest mountains. It is probably the same deluge which exists in the mythology of Greece. Thus Ovid, in his beautiful account of the deluge of Dencalion, says:

"Jamque mare et tellus nullum discrimen habebant;

Omnia pontus erant. Deerant quoque littora ponto."

Even the Mosaic narrative of Noah reappears in the "Metamorphoses:"

"Jupiter, ut liquidis stagnare paludis orbem, Et superesse videt de tot modo millibus unum, Et superesse videt de tot modo millibus unam, Innocuos ambos, cultores numinis ambos, Nubila disjecit."

This deluge was occasioned by the "opening of the windows of heaven" and the "breaking up of the fountains of the great deep ;" or, in the highly poetical words of the "Metamorphoses," Neptune, coming to the aid of Jove, summoned the rivers to his palace and commanded them to pour forth their strength.

"Hi redeunt, ac fontibus ora relaxant,
Et defrænato volvuntur in æquora cursu.
Ipse tridente suo terram percussit; et illa
Intremuit, motuque sinus patefacit aquarum."

There can be no doubt that a destructive inundation, general throughout the East, occurred in the early history of our race. Neither is it to be doubted that well-known natural causes have been adequate to the production of such an inundation. As the upheaval of some portion of the Alps, in the period just before the creation of man, sent a destructive inundation over a large part of Europe, so the uprising of some portion of the mountains of the Cau

casus, including Mt. Ararat, may easily have been accompanied by the emission of such quantities of watery vapor as by condensation to deluge half a continent. Such a visitation, transforming the surface of extensive areas, has been witnessed by our race during the period of authentic history.

The hydrographic changes which have transpired in northern China are among the most extensive and remarkable that have been witnessed by man. On all except the most recent maps of China, the Hoang Ho or Yellow River is represented as having its outlet in the Yellow Sea, near the city of Hwaingan, in latitude 34°. During the Taiping rebellion, a few years since, the course of this mighty river was changed from the neighborhood of Kaifung, three hundred miles above its mouth, and a new channel was established, leading into the Gulf of Pechele, three hundred and eighty miles in a straight line northwest of its old outlet. But this channel has not been established without the most terrible inundations of the low and level delta of the Hoang Ho. This delta covers all the northeastern portion of China south of the "Great Wall," and north of Hangchau and Honan.

Nor has this been the first nor the greatest occasion when this unbridled and destructive river, fed by the melting snows of the Mongolian plateaus, has deserted its bed and sought out new outlets to the sea. According to the oldest Chinese records, the Hoang Ho, previous to the time of the "Great Yu," which was about 2200 years before Christ, pursued a totally different course from the place of its crossing the northern boundary of China into Mongolia. At this place it emptied into a vast lake half the size of the Persian Gulf, which in turn connected eastwardly with another vast lake stretching to Pekin, from which the drainage found an outlet into the northwestern

angle of the Gulf of Pechele, near Tiensin. The "Great Yu❞—whether this be the name of a monarch or the personification of a great nationturned the river southward four hundred miles, between the provinces of Shensi and Shansi, to Fuchan, whence he conducted it eastward two hundred and seventy-five miles to Kaifung. At Kaifung the river divided, one main outlet stretching east-southeast to the Yellow Sea, and several others winding toward the northwest and debouching in the Gulf of Pechele. The area included between the new and the old channels was not less than 280,000 square miles, or about equal to all the New England and Middle States of our Union.

Since the time of Yu, the Hoang Ho has made extensive changes in its bed not less than eight times previously to the last change. The great delta has been cut in every direction. Sometimes the exclusive outlet of the river has been by one or more mouths in the Gulf of Pechele; at others it has been exclusively in the Yellow Sea, and at still others the river has had outlets in both directions. The Yangtse has participated to some extent in these wanderings. In the mean time, the Yellow Sea and the Gulf of Pechele have been filling up with sediments. In many places the shore line has traveled one hundred feet per year for the last two thousand years. In other places the change is not over thirty feet per year. This effect is probably in part due to a slow rising of the eastern border of the continent. Such a rising is felt at numerous places. The island of Tsung-Ming, at the mouth of the Yangtse, which now has a populalation of half a million, did not exist in the fourteenth century. Beaches of recent shells are seen in the south of China, many feet above the present sea-level. Similar beaches are found on the Japanese Islands from fifty to

one thousand feet above the sea. On the island of Formosa, such beaches occur at an elevation of one thousand one hundred feet. A Dutch fort, built in 1634 upon an island detached from Formosa, is now some distance inland, and stands in the center of a large city.

Such are indications of a gradual emergence of the eastern border of the continent, producing a very considerable extension of the land. The growth, of the land is, however, only approaching a condition which has heretofore existed. The records and traditions of the Chinese carry us back to a time when Corea was continuous westwardly with the main land. The Gulf of Pechele and the Yellow Sea had no existence. The great Delta-plain extended to the Japanese Islands. Indeed, the hydrographic maps of the Chinese waters demonstrate that the continental surface extends strictly to the submerged ridge running through Niphon, Lew-Chew and Formosa. Here is the proper rim of the basin of the Pacific. Traditions exist of the former extension of the continent far toward this limit. Here, then, is an area equal to the half of Europe, over which the forefathers of our race extended their migrations, on which they built cities and founded dynasties, and which the race have lived to see sunken beneath the Pacific, and the memory of which had been almost forgotten.

Shall we point to still another example? Southeast of Asia lies the great Malay Archipelago. It includes the great islands of Sumatra, Borneo, Celebes, the Phillippines and New Guinea. Still further southeast is the continent of Australia. The numberless islands of this Archipelago are mostly but the higher eminence of an ancient prolongation of the Asiatic Continent that has been sunken by volcanic action. All around through Sumatra and Java to Mindinao and the

Phillippines is a chain of active and extinct volcanoes, from whose craters incalculable volumes of molten matter have been ejected, even during the historic period of our race. The island of Java alone is the site of fortyseven of these volcanic vents. To supply eruptions of such magnitude, has undermined the solid crust throughout all the neighboring region. The southern angle of the continent has sunken till its valleys lie from fifty to one hundred fathoms below the level of the sea, while its mountains stand even up to the chin in water. The sunken area is four thousand miles in length from east to west, and thirteen hundred in breadth from north to south.

This subsidence has transpired during the modern epoch of geological history. Not only birds and insects, but reptiles and ponderous quadrupeds, that once had liberty to range over the continental surface, are now restricted to isolated islands, whose limits are even yet becoming narrower. The eastern portion of the Malay Archipelago, however, is separated from the western by a deep ocean channel. New Guinea, Ceram and Timor present the same alliances with Australia as the other islands do with Asia. As the species of the Indo-Malayan Archipelago exhibit a divergence from the Asiatic shore, so those of the Austro-Malayan Archipelago declare their descent from Australian progenitors. Even the human races reveal the same affinities and bespeak the same migrations. We are led thus to the following conclusion: At some period in the history of our species, when the Australian and the Malayan race-types had already come into existence, the Australian held possession of the Australian Continent in all its former extent. At the same time the Malay wandered down the Asiatic Peninsula as far as Borneo, and found its further progress intercepted by the deep sea dissevering the two