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Geology of St. Croiz. 
and health permit, I may, perhaps, on a future occasion, extend 
my remarks to one or two other sega and touch. on some other 
topics. 
I am not aware that more than two or three of the West India 
islands have attracted the attention of any geological observer. 
Indeed, the tropical countries in both hemispheres must yet be re- 
garded, so far as geology is concerned, as nearly a terra incognita. 
Sull, they will no doubt furnish highly important results in this 
Interesting science. Here some of its most specious theories will 
be tested ; and here, too, will be found entombed new races of or- 
ganized beings, brought into existence and advanced to maturity, 
and finally destroyed, in circumstances differing from any present 
or past in other parts of the globe. - If the axis of the earth has 
been changed, as some philosophers maintain, here we shall find 
the evidence of it, in a change of organic remains, corresponding 
with that in the northern regions, but in a reverse order. On the 
other hand, if the extraordinary size and character of fossil relics, 
in the high latitudes, are owing to a secular refrigeration of the 
earth, it will be interesting to know what were the types of ani- 
mal and vegetable life, during the same geological periods, in the 
equatorial regions. If past periods in the tropics were as much 
more favorable than the present to the gigantic development of 
organic existencés, as they certainly were in ours, the imagina- 
tion can scarcely paint the monsters, which careful research may 
bring to light. I must confess, however, I saw nothing in the 
West Indies to countenance such suppositions. No animals or 
saurians, to my knowledge, contemporaneous with those im- 
bedded in the secondary and tertiary formations of Europe and 
America, have ae been detected ; nor, if we except the island of 
T 
‘inked ie v of any indications of the existence of ex- 
. erranean its of vegetable matter. The pitch- 
ie or that island, and the. petroleum which oozes from the 
rocks on the coast, are- probably due to a vegetable origin; but if 
similar indications of carbon in a fossil state exist in other ‘init 
they are yet to be discovered. 
Most of the islands in the West Indies, as is well known, ex- 
hibit marks of volcanic action. Though not lying ieithin the 
range of that great line of volcanoes which extends along the 
western coast of South America, and reaches to Mexico, they 
_ have often been _— to destructive earthquakes ; and two of 
9 
Vou. AXXV.—No. 1. 
