Madagascar, the Comoros, and the Seychelles have been treated by many naturalists as the surviving fragments of a vanished world, which from a typical branch of its now dispersed fauna has received the name of "Lemuria."
1890, [Jacques] Élisée Reclus, “The Oceanic Hemisphere”, in A. H. Keane, editor, Oceanica (The Earth and Its Inhabitants; 14), New York: D. Appleton and Company, page 3