28 NAP J RIM J. 



Fernando on the west coast to Manzanilla on tlie east, 

 stretches a band of soil which seems to be capable of 

 yielding any conceivable return to labour and capital, not 

 omitting common sense. 



How long it has taken to prepare tliis natural garden for 

 man is one of those questions of geological time which have 

 been well called of late " appalling." How long was it since 

 the " older Parian " rocks (said to belong to the Neoco- 

 mian, or green-sand, era) of Point a Pierre Avere laid down 

 at the bottom of the sea? How long since a still unknown 

 thickness of tertiary strata in the Xariva district laid down 

 on them ? How long since not less than six thousand feet of 

 still later tertiar}^ strata laid down on them again ? What 

 vast, though probably slow, processes changed that sea- 

 bottom from one salt enough to carry corals and lime- 

 stones, to one brackish enough to carry abundant remains 

 of plants, deposited probably by the Orinoco, or by some 

 river which then did duty for it ? Three such periods of 

 disturbance have been distinguished, the net result of 

 Avhich is, that the strata (comparatively recent in geological 

 time) have been fractured, tilted, even set upright on end, 

 over the whole lowland. Trinidad seems to have had its 

 full share of those later disturbances of the earth-crust, 

 which carried tertiary strata up along the shoulders of the 

 Alps ; which upheaved the chalk of the Isle of Wight, 



