4 CUBA AND POltTO RICO 



North American continent in the direction of Nova Scotia. 

 A similar southward extension of the North American 

 Cordilleras would carry them into the waters of the Pacific, 

 crossing the equator far west of Central America and the 

 South American continent. 



In the tropical latitudes, between the widely separated 

 termini of the North and South American Cordilleras, as 

 above defined, and extending directly at right angles to 

 them, lies another mountain system, to which the term 

 " Antillean " may be applied. This has been the fundamen- 

 tal factor in West Indian configuration, although the system 

 has not usually been properly appreciated by geologist and 

 geographer, owing, no doubt, to the fact that its remarka- 

 ble and continuous ranges are largely submerged beneath 

 the waters of the Caribbean Sea. 



East-and-west mountain ranges of the Antillean type 

 occur through the Great Antilles, along the Venezuelan and 

 Colombian coast of South America, north of the Orinoco ; 

 in the Isthmus of Panama, Costa Rica, and the eastern 

 parts of Nicaragua, Guatemala, Honduras, Yucatan, 

 Chiapas, and southern Oaxaca. The two elongated sub- 

 marine ridges, separated by the deep oceanic valley 

 known as "Bartlett Deep," which stretch across the 

 Caribbean from the Antilles to the Central American 

 coast, from the west end of the Sierra Maestra range of 

 Cuba to the coast of Honduras, and from Jamaica to 

 Cape Gracias a Dios, respectively, are similar in configu- 

 ration to the east-and-west mountain ranges of the Great 

 Antilles, and are, no doubt, genetically a part of them. 



The Antillean system is made up of east-and-west 

 mountain ranges composed of folded sedimentaries. Like 

 the Rocky Mountains and the Andes, it is accompanied by 

 volcanic intrusions and ejecta, but, instead of dominating 

 a continental region, these uplifts practically have their 

 greatest development on the Antillean Islands and in the 

 submarine topography of the sea, and form a mountainous 

 perimeter of the depressed Caribbean basin. 



