LEMU'RIA, a name given by certain geologists and anthropologists to a supposititious or lost continent. Such a continent, it is claimed, existed in a distant, yet not extremely remote geologic age. The position assigned it is in the Indian ocean, beneath the waters of which imagination sees it submerged; and attempts have even been made to define its bounds. The derivation of the name is from the Latin lemur, a specter, used by scien tists to designate a genus of mammalia common in Madagascar and adjacent regions. The name was first bestowed by Sclater. The argument for-the existence of such a land is mostly of an a priori kind, though some positive geological evidence exists. The belief is more especially accepted by some of the upholders of the monogenist theory of the propagation of the human species, as offering a plausible locality for the nativity of the first parents of mankind. Many otherwise difficult problems, both ethnological and
geological, may be readily solved by taking for granted the existence of Lemuria. Thus, sir John Lubbock, in his Prehistoric Times, claims that the present position of the Negroid races of Africa is explicable only on the hypothesis that, since their first appearance, immense geographical changes have taken pface; that there must have been a very laige tract of land, or perhaps a great chain of islands, stretching from the e. coast of Africa across the Indian ocean, while that sea was then covering the great African deserts.
On the whole, while the former existence of extensive tracts of land in the region is extremely probable, it cannot as yet be accepted as proven, however convenient it might be as a universal depository of "missing links."