218 CORALS AND CORAL ISLANDS. 
group, and those of Long Cay and Rum Cay are described as 
equalling those of the Bermudas. 
The Bahamas differ from ordinary atolls more in the 
great size of the two western banks, and the wide distribu- 
tion and high heapings of the wind-drift deposits, than in any 
other characteristics. Some peculiarities are due also to the 
position of the reefs, — one end resting on a sea-border pla- 
teau and the other extending out into the deeper waters of 
the ocean. To the westward, a rise of three thousand feet . 
would make one land of Florida, Cuba, and the Bahamas; but 
the Bahamas to the eastward would still be a line of oceanic 
islands. As to evidences of recent elevation nothing is posi- 
tively known. The great extent and height of the drift-made 
dry land appears to indicate a long resting at the present 
level. 
~The Bermuda or Somers’ Islands. —The Bermudas are 
what remains of a large atoll, as first announced by Lieutenant 
Nelson ;* and this atoll is the most remote from the equator 
of any existing. It lies in deep seas between the parallels 
1 Transactions of the Geological Society of London, 1840, v., 103. 
The following are other important publications on the structure of the Bermu- 
das: The Reports of the Challenger Expedition of 1873 and 1876, by Sir Wyville 
Thomson, London, vol. i.; ‘ The Naturalist in Bermuda,” by John Matthew Jones, 
with a map and illustrations, London, 1859; also, by the same, “ A Visitor’s Guide 
to Bermuda;” Observations on the Bermudas, in Nature for 1872; and on the geo- 
logical features of the Bermudas in the Proceedings and Transactions of the Nova 
Scotia Institute of Natural Science, 1867; A paper on the Bermuda Reefs by 
Dr. J. J. Rein, in the Senckenberg. Ber. naturforsch. Gesellschaft, 1869-70, and 
Verhandlung des I. deutsch. Geographentages fiir 1881, Berlin, 1882. There are 
also two valuable American contributions to the Geology of the Bermudas, one by 
Prof. William North Rice, of Middletown, Conn., 32 pp. 8vo, being Bulletin No. 25 
of the U. S. National Museum, 1884; and a volume by A. Heilprin, of Philadel- 
phia, entitled “ The Bermuda Islands: a contribution to the Physical History and 
Zoology of the Somers’ Archipelago,” a handsomely illustrated work of 231 pp. 8vo, 
treating of the coral reefs, and also of the zoology, and discussing at length the 
coral-island problem, with conclusions favoring, like those of Professor Rice, the 
Darwinian theory. 
