Here, poor Forbes made a continent to N. America & another (or the same) to the Gulf of
weed. – Hooker makes one from New Zealand to S. America & round the world to
Kerguelen Land. Here is Wollaston speaking of Madeira & P. Santo “as the sure &
certain witnesses” of a former continent. Here is Woodward writes to me if you grant a
continent over 200 or 300 miles of ocean-depths (as if that was nothing) why not extend a
continent to every island in the Pacific & Atlantic oceans! And all this within the
existence of recent species! If you do not stop this, if there be a lower region for the
punishment of geologists, I believe, my great master, you will go there. Why your
disciples in a slow & creeping manner beat all the old catastrophists who ever lived. –
You will live to be the great chief of the catastrophists!
– Charles R. Darwin, in a letter to Lyell (1856),
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