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Legendary islands of the Atlantic; a study in medieval geography

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Autolocus
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« Reply #30 on: July 19, 2009, 02:53:50 am »

CONNECTION WITH EUROPE AND AFRICA 21

many of which are of European-Mediterranean affinities of late Tertiary
time, we see that the evidence appears to indicate clearly that the Cape
Verde and Canary Islands are fragments of a greater Africa. . .
What evidence there may be to show that this fracturing and breaking
down of western Africa took place as suddenly as related by Plato or that
it occurred about 10,000 years ago is as yet unknown to geologists. 11

Termier puts in evidence as biological corroboration the re-
searches of Louis Germain, especially in the mollusca, which
have convinced him of the continental origin of this fauna in the
four archipelagoes, the Azores, Madeira, the Canaries, and Cape
Verde. He also notes a few species still living in the Azores and
the Canaries, though extinct in Europe, but found as fossils in
Pliocene rocks of Portugal. He deduces from this a connection
between the islands and the Iberian Peninsula down to some
period during the Pliocene. 13

Dr. Scharff has devoted some space and assiduous effort to
similar considerations. He reviews the insular flora and fauna,
pointing out that some of the forms common to the islands, or
some of them, and a now distant continent could hardly have
reached there over sea. He comes to the following conclusion: "I
believe they [the islands] were still connected, in early Pleistocene
times, with the continents of Europe and Africa, at a time when
man had already made his appearance in western Europe, and
was able to reach the islands by land." 13

He also points out that the Azores Islands were first known and
named for their hawks, which feed largely on small mammalia,
that presumably would have come thither overland, and also
points out that some of the islands were named in Italian on old
maps Rabbit Island, Goat Island, etc., before the Portuguese re-
discovery in the fifteenth century. 14 Those names (on several
fifteenth-century maps St. Mary's is Louo, Lovo, or Luovo
"Wolf Island," cf. Portuguese lobo) are certainly interesting,

11 Geogr. Rev., Vol. 3, 1917, p. 65.

"Termier, pp. 231 and 232.
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