22 CUBA AND PORTO RICO 



continent from Massachusetts to the eastern end of the 

 Great Antilles. They are all monotypic, consisting of 

 low heaps of calcareous shells and coral sand, which have 

 been piled up above a submerged platform by wind and 

 wave. 



According to Bacot, the Bahamas, excluding the Caicos 

 and Turks groups, comprise 690 islands and islets and 

 2387 rocks or separate reefs, with a total area of 5(500 

 square miles. Including the Caicos and Turks, which 

 belong to the group, the actual number can scarcely be 

 less than 3200, of which only 31 were inhabited in 1890, 

 with a total population of 54,000. They stretch northwest 

 and southeast between Florida and Santo Domingo for a 

 distance of 780 miles. They rise from a shallow subma- 

 rine platform separated from Santo Domingo and Cuba 

 by the Old Bahama Channel, twelve thousand feet deep. 

 This platform may represent the planed-down summit of a 

 submarine ridge akin to the Antillean uplifts. Unlike the 

 Antilles, the Bahamas are of low relief, often barely pro- 

 jecting their heads above the water, and their wind-blown 

 sand-dunes nowhere rise to an altitude greater than one 

 hundred feet. 



The Caribbee Islands, which close the eastern gate of 

 the Caribbean, are as different from the Bahamas as are 

 the Bahamas from the Great Antilles, although they too 

 are the projecting tip of a submerged ridge which has its 

 greater extent beneath the water. They extend in a gentle 

 curve from the Anegada Passage of Porto Rico southward 

 to Trinidad, and include twenty-one islands besides the 

 Grenadines. The latter include several hundred distinct 

 islets, often merely heads of rock rising above the sea, and 

 extending sixty miles in the general axis of the chain, 

 between St. Vincent and Grenada. Barbados, about one 

 hundred miles east of the circle, and Aves or Bird Island, 

 about two hundred miles west, are included by some 

 writers in the Caribbean chain, but we shall not so con- 

 sider them. 



