9 o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



glow with the sparkling colors of jewels. The hot air is loaded 

 with moisture to the saturation-point, like that of the deep, shady 

 recesses of a rocky glen on the edge of a waterfall ; but the islands 

 are also as wind-swept as a mountain-top, and the air is absolutely 

 pure, for the ocean breeze brings with it no smoke nor dust, no 

 pollen nor vegetable refuse, nor anything whatever except pure, 

 moist, warm air. As the saturated sea-breeze blows over the 

 thousand islands of the archipelago, the slight difference between 

 the temperature of the changeless ocean and that of the variable 

 land, which heats quickly in the daytime and cools quickly at 

 night, manifests itself by the formation of great, snow-white banks 

 of summer clouds which are as characteristic of the Bahama hori- 

 zon as the water itself or the deep, pure blue of the sky between 

 the clouds. 



The islands stand on the extreme edge of a submerged abyss 

 where the surface falls as suddenly and to as great a depth as 

 it does from the summit of the Andes, and the unfathomable wa- 

 ter of mid-ocean is only a few miles away. Some of the out 

 islands are only two miles or so from water more than two miles 

 deep, and the currents which sweep through the sounds and 

 around the islands at each turn of the tide are absolutely pure, 

 and they have the intense color which is found in mid-ocean, or 

 the melted ice of glacial lakes, or in the center of the rocky basin 

 of Lake Superior. In great depths this color is a pure, vivid sap- 

 phire blue, darker but more transparent than the blue of the 

 sky. In the shallow sounds, where the intense sunlight is re- 

 flected back from the chalky bottom, it glows like a surface of 

 beryl with an intense green lustre totally unlike anything which 

 is met with in other waters, although the center of the Horse- 

 shoe at Niagara would be very similar if it plunged over a ledge 

 of white marble under the light of a tropical sun. All these 

 influences combine to give a degree of intensity and vividness 

 which can not exist in a continent to ail the colors of a landscape 

 which is wrapped in perpetual spring. Under their dome of 

 blue sky and snowy clouds the Isles of June, in their setting of 

 sapphire, are buried under a mantle of verdure so dense and lux- 

 uriant that the vegetation thrives as if in a hot-house, and, aban- 

 doning the rocky and sterile ground and contenting themselves 

 with the warm, moist sea-breeze, not only the mosses and ferns 

 and orchids and bromeliads, but large trees as well, grow tier 

 above tier, climbing over each other's heads in their efforts to 

 escape the struggle for existence and to obtain air and sunlight 

 and standing-room. 



Who can wonder that, when Columbus found himself in this 

 enchanted fairy -land after the changeless monotony of mid-ocean 

 and all the anxieties of his long voyage into unknown waters, he 



