d, should not this inference take us back
to still earlier times, and where did the civilization necessary for
the plant's cultivation exist, or the climate and circumstances
requisite for its transportation, unless there were at some time a
link between the old world and the new?

Professor Wallace in his delightful _Island Life_ as well as other
writers in many important works, have put forward ingenious hypotheses
to account for the identity of flora and fauna on widely separated
lands, and for their transit across the ocean, but all are
unconvincing, and all break down at different points.

It is well known that wheat as we know it has never existed in a truly
wild state, nor is there any evidence tracing its descent from fossil
species. Five varieties of wheat were _already cultivated_ in Europe
in the stone age--one variety found in the "Lake dwellings" being
known as Egyptian wheat, from which Darwin argues that the Lake
dwellers "either still kept up commercial intercourse with some
southern people, or had originally proceeded as colonists from the
south." He concludes that wheat, barley, oats, etc., are descended
from various _species now extinct_, or so widely different as to
escape identification in which case he says: "Man must have
cultivated cereals from an enormously remote period." The regions
where these extinct species flourished, and the civilization under
which they were cultivated by intelligent selection, are both supplied
by the lost continent whose colonists carried them east and west.

_Third._--From the fauna and flora we now turn to man.

_Language._--The Basque language stands alone amongst European
tongues, having affinity with none of them. According to Farrar,
"there never has been any doubt that this isolated language,
preserving its identity in a western corner of Europe, between two
mighty kingdoms, resembles in its structure the aboriginal languages
of the vast opposite continent (America) and those alone" (_Families
of Speech_, p. 132).

The Phoenicians apparently were the first nation in the Eastern
Hemisphere to use a phonetic alphabet, the characters being regarded
as mere signs for sounds. It is a curious fact that at an equally
early date we find a phonetic alphabet in Central America amongst the
Mayas of Yucatan, whose traditions ascribe the origin of their
civilization to a land across the sea to the east. Le Plongeon, the
great authority on this subject, writes: "One-thi