He had provided himself with charts, which had been distended in an irregular line above his head, and to these he occasionally referred. His reading of the important pages before him was clear and audible, but totally neglectful, of the informing appliances in elocution, of melody of voice, accent and deliberation. The lecture was brilliant and distinguished, and quite comparable in its qualities to the serious people who had gathered in great intellectual force to receive its instructions. CHAPTER II. THE LECTURE. Note.--If the reader is too much interested in getting to the upshot of this tale, let him skip the Lecture. But it is a mistake. This Lecture was delivered by Mr. Binn on the Ninth of April, 1909, and is well worth while. “Mr. President, Dr. Smith and Ladies and Gentlemen,” began the speaker; “The area of the Panama Isthmus and the West Indies has been an area of successional changes very considerable in their amount, very persistent in their frequency. It embraces a tropical area contiguous on its Pacific side to a meridional section of the earth which is very unstable, and which almost monopolizes the contemporaneous volcanic energy of the earth. It adjoins, or is limited itself on the east, in the Atlantic, by the Antillean islets, the emergent crests of submerged volcanic vents. It could be presumptively held, on these grounds, that the Isthmus itself partook of these characters of inequilibrated crustal motions. It might be affirmed, with a fair amount of precision, that its future history would continue this impression. “The West Indies, as defined by Hill, embracing the islands that with Cuba form a long convexity terminating in Trinidad, on the coast of S. America, represent to-day a disintegrated continent. They are supposed to have embodied a former geographical unity. It had terrestrial magnitude, and lay Atlantis-like between South America and North America, at a time when the present narrow neck of land upon which our eyes are now, as a nation, fixed with anxious preoccupation, was itself swept over by the confluent waters of the two oceans, and when at that point which now forms an attenuated avenue of intercourse between North and South America, the tides of a broad water way alternated in their allegiance to the East or West coasts of the separated continents; and possibly a precarious and fluctuating contribution from the warm Gulf Stream found its way into the Pacific.