and Haeckel is perfectly
correct in saying that England--he might with greater accuracy have
said the islands of Great Britain and Ireland, which were then joined
together--"has repeatedly been connected with the European continent,
and been repeatedly separated from it."

In order to bring the subject more dearly before the mind, a tabular
statement is here annexed which supplies a condensed history of the
animal and plant life on our globe, bracketed--according to
Haeckel--with the contemporary rock strata. Two other columns give the
contemporary races of man, and such of the great cataclysms as are
known to occult students.

[Sidenote: Reptiles and Pine Forests.]

From this statement it will be seen that Lemurian man lived in the age
of Reptiles and Pine Forests. The amphibious monsters and the gigantic
tree-ferns of the Permian age still flourished in the warm damp
climates. Plesiosauri and Icthyosauri swarmed in the tepid marshes of
the Mesolithic epoch, but, with the drying up of many of the inland
seas, the Dinosauria--the monstrous land reptiles--gradually became
the dominant type, while the Pterodactyls--the Saurians which
developed bat-like wings--not only crawled on the earth, but flew
through the air. The smallest of these latter were about the size of a
sparrow; the largest, however, with a breadth of wing of more than
sixteen feet, exceeding the largest of our living birds of to-day;
while most of the Dinosauria--the Dragons--were terrible beasts of
prey, colossal reptiles which attained a length of from forty to fifty
feet.[13] Subsequent excavations have laid bare skeletons of an even
larger size. Professor Ray Lankester, at a meeting of the Royal
Institution on 7th January, 1904, is reported to have referred to a
brontosaurus skeleton of sixty-five feet long, which had been
discovered in the Oolite deposit in the southern part of the United
States of America.

|Depth of| | | | |
Rock Strata. | Strata.| Races of Men. | Cataclysms. | Animals. | Plants. |
| Feet. | | | | |
-------------------------+--------+------------------+-----------------------+--------------+------------------|
Laurentian } | |First Root Race | | |