ages before the Christian era. The ancient Greek fable of the floating islands called Symplegades probably originated in the volcanic movements of the earth's crust in the vicinity of the Thracian Bosporus, the ineffaceable traces of which are still to be seen.

The entire chain of the Aleutian Islands, ranging across the North Pacific from Alaska to Kamtschatka, is but a series of vestiges of an ancient ridge of land now worn out, but originally raised by the power of volcanic fires which are even to-day smouldering beneath the bed of the sea. These fires, as late as 1796, burst out a few miles north of the island of Unalaska, and added another member to the group, which has continued to grow in size till recent times.

As might be expected, the records of continental oscillations are not confined to sea-coast lines, but may be detected along our lakes and in the valleys of the rivers.

If such changes occur in a lifetime, what may not a slow subsidence or elevation amount to in the lifetime of our race? A depression in the valley of the Lower Mississippi of only three hundred feet would admit the waters of the Gulf of Mexico up to the mouth of the Ohio. A trifling depression in Northern Illinois would furnish an outlet to the Gulf for Lakes Michigan, Superior, and Huron. A depression of eight hundred feet would submerge nearly the whole of the Southern and Western States.

How easy, then, in view of facts which every body can observe, to admit the geological doctrine of the former submergence of all the continents. The shells broken from the wall of the gorge at Trenton Falls, though unlike any fresh-water forms, are still the kindred of beings now living in the Atlantic; and, with the evidence before us, we can not resist the conviction that the dominion of the sea once extended over the Empire State. As the relics of Roman

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dominion are found in England and France, and Germany and Palestine, and nobody questions the testimony of these relics, so the antiquities of Old Ocean have been exhumed from the soil of every state. Who can now perpetrate the folly of denying to one empire the universality which every body concedes to the other?

So reasoned Fracastoro when, in 1517, the exhumation of a multitude of curious petrifactions at Verona, in Italy, had aroused the speculations of numerous writers. But his reasonable suggestion was too bold for the philosophy of that age, and Fracastoro was stamped a heretic by that papal orthodoxy which persecuted also

"The starry Galileo with his woes."