Читать книгу The Evacuation of England: The Twist in the Gulf Stream онлайн

41 страница из 55

“What were these in the growth and disappearance of this Columbian continent? What they have been, we can, with rational probability, assume they will be.

“The Columbian continent, I have called a dismembered, a fractionized continent. If from Cuba through Haiti, Porto Rico, and the lesser Antilles one land surface obtained, and the now submerged and radiating gorges, found only as submarine canyons, were above the ocean, becoming, as Prof. Spencer has laboriously proven, sub-aerial river valleys, we should have one presumable phase of this continent, the phase of its maximum cohesion and extension. And such a phase is measurably or, for purposes of argumentative inference, sensibly established. It is said with careful premeditation by Hill that ‘the numerous islets of its eastern border, the Bahamas and Windward chain, which extend from Florida to the mouth of the Orinoco, are merely the summits of steep submarine ridges, which divide the depths of the Atlantic from those of the Gulf of Mexico, and Caribbean sea; were their waters a few feet lower, these ridges would completely landlock the seas from the ocean.’