148 JOURNAL, BOMBAY NATURAL HISTORY SOCIETY. t89l 



there must have been another subsidence. For, as we have seen. 

 Dr. Fryer, 220 years ago, found the island no longer one. If that 

 subsidence is still continuing, as seems not improbable, we would 

 appear to be on the way to being slowly submerged, and are doing 

 our best to aid the efforts of nature in this direction by cutting down 

 all our hills ! On the other hand, if the waters around us are not 

 being deepened by a subsidence of their floor, we are in danger of being- 

 silted up by mud and sand, if not lifted bodily back on to the main- 

 land by another upheaval. In either event farewell to Bombay's, 

 greatness as a maritime j> or t> even if she escapes destruction In 

 another eruption, the possibility of which is at least indicated by her 

 past history, and these continual upheavals and depressions, which 

 ran only be the work of volcanic forces ! 



But, as the novelists say, I anticipate. Besides, I am wandering 

 away from my subject, which is connected with Bombay only in the 

 past tense, not in the paulo-post-future. 



To return to the last upheaval that brought the shelly sand of the 

 ocean's floor to the surface of the dry land, that it occurred in what 

 geologists (whose computation of time is not by years, but by cycles 

 of ages) call "recent" times, is shown not only by the fact that the 

 shells of the littoral concrete are such as we find on our shores 

 to-day, but that in the brown earth which underlies the clay below 

 it are found unmistakeable traces of human occupation. This brings 

 us to the last page that has yet been opened of our unwritten history, 

 where we find traced in clear characters the word "Man," which 

 makes the facts recorded on it, though not so surprising as some wo 

 have already learned, yet, perhaps, of more personal interest to us. 



Some twelve years ago, while the excavations were being made for 

 the Prince's Dock, Mr. George Ormiston came on the remains of 

 what was evidently a submerged forest, 32 feet below high water 

 mark. Nearly 400 trees in all were found, of which 223 Mere still 

 standing erect, and 159, though prostrate, were still rooted in the 

 soil. This was a shallow band of brownish earth, ajoparently identi- 

 cal with that which we have seen to exist at Bj^culla, for it seemed 

 to be of marine origin, but altered by atmospheric weathering, and 

 immediately underlay the blue estuarine clay in which (he trees wer< 

 buried, and overlay the trap rock. The trees were all a species of 



