could scarcely hope to discover by the sounding line, viz., the former configuration and articulation of the land. This attractive subject (to the connection of which with the migrations of plants and the distribution of the races of men we drew attention at the beginning of this note), can only be fully elucidated when we shall succeed in acquiring further knowledge of the depth and nature of the different rocks which serve as a foundation for the lower strata of the dead polyp-trunks. Footnote 78: p. 216—“_Of the Samothracian Traditions_.” Diodorus has preserved to us these remarkable traditions, the probability of which has invested them with almost historical certainty in the eyes of geologists. The island of Samothrace, once also named Ethiopea, Dardania, and Leucania or Leucosia in the Scholiast of Apollonius Rhodius, the seat of the ancient mysteries of the Cabiri, was inhabited by the remnant of an aboriginal people, several words of whose vernacular language were preserved in later times in sacrificial ceremonies. The position of Samothrace, opposite to the Thracian Hebrus, and near the Dardanelles, explains why a more circumstantial tradition of the great catastrophe of an outburst of the waters of the Pontus (Euxine) should have been especially preserved in this island. Sacred rites were here performed at altars erected on the supposed limits of this inundation; and among the Samothracians, as well as the Bœetians, a belief in the periodical destruction of the human race (a belief which also prevailed among the Mexicans in their myth of the four destructions of the world) was associated with historical recollections of individual inundations.[LN] According to Diodorus, the Samothracians related that the Black Sea had been an inland lake, which, swelled by the influx of rivers (long prior to the inundations which had occurred among other nations) had burst, first through the straits of the Bosphorus, and subsequently through those of the Hellespont.[LO] These ancient revolutions of nature have been considered in a special treatise, by Dureau de la Malle, and all the facts known regarding them collected by Carl von Hoff, in an important work on the subject.[LP] The Samothracian traditions seem reflected as it were in the Sluice-theory of Strato of Lampsacus, according to which the swelling of the waters in the Euxine first formed the passage of the Dardanelles, and next the opening through the Pillars of Hercules. Strabo, in the first book of his Geography, has preserved among the critical extracts from the works of Eratosthenes, a remarkable fragment of the lost work of Strato, which presents views that embrace almost the whole circumference of the Mediterranean.