266 



reservedly M. However, the petrograpliic liabitus of (his woiild-he 

 cretaceous formation, made up of while limestones, of soft, white 

 marls and of loose calcareous sandstones, is quite dilTerent from all 

 the cretaceous rocks known from the other Antilles, Central America 

 and Northern South-America, sothat Cuba seemed to be isolated 

 from the rest in this respect. Another peculiarity of Cuba seemed 

 to be that on the whole the tertiary is not very thick and only feebly 

 folded: Hill') says that the tertiary is merely a thin veneer over- 

 lying the older formations sothat its thickness does not excel 1000 

 feet, and Hayes-Vaughan-Spencer have reproduced profiles of the 

 island in which everywhere a very feebly folded tertiaiy formation 

 is marked'). If this is correct, Cuba ditfers very much from the 

 other Antilles, for in Haiti*), Babados as well as in Trinidad ^) there 

 are very thick and intensely folded tertiary deposits, as may be 

 expected in a young mountain-range, such as Suess asserts the 

 Antilles to be composed of. 



A two months' stay in Cuba, in the months of March and August 

 of the past year, put me in a position to explain this seeming con- 

 tradiction and to detect some striking resemblances between Cuba 

 and the other Antilles. 



First of all the so-called cretaceous deposits in the environs of 

 Habana were explored. They can readily be examined in numerous 

 exposures along roads and railway cuts in and near the capital. 

 They are composed of white soft, sometimes nodular, fine-grained 

 marls; of light-coloured, youngish looking, organogenetic limestones, 

 which are seldom very pure, most often however contain some 

 volcanic tuff-material; of true submarine tuffs; while sometimes also 

 peculiar fine-grained limestone-breccias occur in the formation. In 

 numerous spots I found in the limestones and in the submarine 

 tuffs micro-organisms, which could be determined in microscopical 

 sections. It now appeared that besides a number of Foraminifera, 

 insignificant for the age of the formation, and besides Lithothamnia, 



n C. W. Hayes, T. W. Vaughan and A. G. Spencer, Geology of Cuba, 1901 

 reprinted in 1918 by the Direccion de Monies y Minas at Habana. 



«) R. T. Hill, I.e. 



8) C. W. Hayes, T. W. Vaughan and A. C. Spencer, I.e. 



*) L. Tippenhauer, Peterm. Geogr. Mitteilungen, 1899, p. 25—29. 153—155, 

 201-204; 1901, p. 121-127, 169—178, 193—199; 1909, p. 49—57. W. F. 

 Jones, Journal of Geology, 26, 1918, p. 728—758. 



^) I. B. Harrison and A. J. Jukes Brown, The geology of Barbados, 1890, 

 and other publications. G. Wall and J. Sawkins, Report on the geology of Tri- 

 nidad, Memoirs Geol. Survey, London, 1860. 



