253 



ties with sharp edges, perhaps the places where softer shells or 

 fragments of corals have been washed out by the erosion or 

 attrition of the water, or knocked out by corals, thrown up in the 

 stormy winter season of the furious north wind. The species of 

 corals and shells which enter into the composition of this rock, I 

 found nearly all alive in the adjoining sea. Some of them, how- 

 ever, have disappeared from among the living ; others are dying 

 out, and are now very rarely found, though common in the earlier 

 portions of the present period ; for they exist in great quantities 

 in the rock at the depth of a few feet. Such animal remains 

 enclosed in rock, yet belonging to species now living, or to species 

 now extinct, but which lived in the earlier ages of this period, 

 together with species now living, we are accustomed to call 

 modern fossils. They are the more interesting because they 

 show how, without any remarkable revolution of our globe, cer- 

 tain species of animals gradually die out. 



The same rock, composed of modern fossils and their detritus, 

 I found in the interior mountain regions of the island, about thirty 

 miles from the sea-shore, and at a height, as I should judge, of at 

 le^st one thousand feet above the present level of the sea. In- 

 deed, the whole first, that is, northernmost, ridge of mountains 

 which runs along that northern sea-shore of Hayti, from east to 

 west, is crowned with large layers or broken masses of this same 

 kind of rock, which being, as stated above, a formation of the 

 present geological period, goes far to show that this whole ridge 

 has been raised in this present period. Thus the existence of the 

 greater part, and the configuration of the whole of the southwest- 

 ern neck of the island of Hayti is of a comparatively recent 

 origin. 



Two questions at once suggest themselves here, whether the for- 

 mation of the same roch, and whether the elevation of the land, are 

 going on at the present time. That the former, the formation of the 

 same limestone rock, is really in progress at the present day, seems 

 to be evident in some places, where the whole bottom of the sea 

 near the shore, at a depth of from one to five and six feet below 

 low-water mark, is, as it were, a flat pavement of the same kind 

 of rock. Crust-building corals, as Porites, Ma^andrinas, Sideras- 

 trseas, etc. live upon it, and in the interstices of these are thrown 

 up from below dead shells, broken Millepores, Madrepores, and 



