Rensselaer Republican, Volume 17, Number 39, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 4 June 1885 — A LOST CONTINENT. [ARTICLE]

A LOST CONTINENT.

Submerged Landa In the South Pacific and the Destruction of Their Capt. William Churchill, before the Academy of Sciences, sought to show by the records of deep-sea soundings and from .archaeological remains the islands only the remnants of the submerged continent, whose mountain peaks and lofty heights are all that remain above the surface of the ocean. He dwelt at length on the subject of a Polynesian antecedent civilization as revealed through ancient implements, statues and sculptured stone slabs found on a few of the groups, more notably the Fejees. The studies of zoophytes and coral formations taken from a depth of 2,000 fathoms and more also confirmed this belief of the subsidence sos the prehistoric continent On Pitcairn’s Island and also on Tahiti and Tonga-Tabu ,had been found remains which showed the existence of a long-forgotten tribe. At TohgaTabu a monster trilithon is to be seen. It is composed of gray volcanic stone, with neatly dressed edges. It is ten by twelve feet square, and stands twenty feet out of the ground. It is surmounted by a huge kava bowl. He describes the implements and metals in use by the natives of several of the groups before the advent of the white voyagers, and said that iron and steel were unknown to them before their discovery by civilized persons. Capt. Churchill described the monolithic statues of stone and sculptured wood found on Easter Island. The monoliths were found standing in rows of five or six, only a few feet apart. They were hewn from volcanic rock, and were either crude in workmanship or else they have suffered from the ravages of time. One row of these statuesi are quite well preserved. Each of them was ten feet high, and they represented human heads and bodies, with a kind of cap or other head covering on the top. were the same statues seen and described by Captain Cook in his works on travel and discovery. A finely sculptured hand of a dancing girl and some polished wooden slabs, on which were numerous hieroglyphical figures in long rows, had been discovered in an ancient and half-ruined stone house on Easter Island. This was the only, relic of a native written language ever found in the Pacific Islands. The depopulation of many of the Polynesian islands through the ravages of disease and “head hunting” was commented upon. Prior to this era of decay there had been a long period of over population, during which the practice of “swarming,” as he termed it, was often resorted to in order* that the remaining people might be able to find subsistence on their limited territory. He points to the well-verified tales of the selection and sending sorta of certain undesirable members of the tribes from their homes in canoes, to drift about in mid-ocean until they perished or reached some less crowded island, where they might find an abiding place. The masses of people crowded together on these small islands must, the speaker argued, have come from a larger terTitory than that which they latterly inhabited. Where could they have gone but into the sea?— San. Francisco Chronicle. . _ ,