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Show 278 PHYSIOGNOMY OF PLANTS. The entire elucidation of this attractive subject (to the connection of which with the migrations of plants and the diffusion of races of men attention was called at the commencement of the present note) can only be hoped for when inquirers shall have succeeded in obtaining greater knowledge than is now possessed of the depth and the nature of the rocks on which the lowest strata of the dead corals rest. ( 8) p. 232.-" Traditions of Samotlwace." Diodorus has preserved to us this remarkable tradition, the probability of which renders it in the eyes of the geologist almost equivalent to an historical certainty. The Island of Samothrace, formerly called also lEthiopea, Dardania, Leucania or Leucosia in the Scholiast to Appollonius Rhodius, and which was a seat of the ancient mysteries of the Cabiri, was inhabited by the remains of an ancient nation, several words of whose language were preserved to a later period in the ceremonies accompanying sacrifices. The situation of this island, opposite to the Thracian Rebrus and near the Dardanelles, renders it not surprising that a more detailed tradition of the catastrophe of the breaking forth of the waters of the Euxine should have been preserved there. Rites were performed at altars supposed to mark the limits of the irruption of the waves; and in Samothrace, as well as in Boootia, a belief in the periodically recurring destruction of mankind (a belief which was also found among the Mexicans in the form of a myth of four destructions of the world) was connected with historical recollections of particular inundations. (Otfr. Miiller Geschichten Hellenischer Stamme und Stadte, bd. i. s. 65 and 119.) According to Diodorus, the Samothracians related that the Black Sea had once been an inland lake, but that, being swollen by the rivers which flow into it, it had broken through, first the Strait of the Bosphorus, and afterwards that of the Hellespont; and this long before the inundations spoken of by other nations. (Diod. Sicul. lib, v. cap. 47, p. 369, Weaseling.) These ancient revolutions of nature have been treated of in a special work by Dureau de la Malle, and all the information possessed on the subject has been collected ip. Carl von Hoff's important work, entitled Geschichte der |