250 COSMOS. 



extended atmosphere, overloaded with vapors. The vast fis- 

 sures which were formerly open in the solid crust of the eartli 

 have since been filled up or closed by the protrusion of eleva- 

 ted mountain chains, or by the penetration of veins of rocks of 

 eruption (granite, porphyry, basalt, and melaphyre) ; and while, 

 on a superficial area equal to that of Europe, there are now 

 scarcely more than four volcanoes remaining through which 

 fire and stones are erupted, the thinner, more fissured, and un- 

 stable crust of the earth was anciently almost every where 

 covered by channels of communication between the fused in- 

 terior and the external atmosphere. Gaseous emanations, ris- 

 ing from very unequal depths, and therefore conveying sub- 

 stances difiering in their chemical nature, imparted greater 

 activity to the Plutonic processes of formation and transform- 

 ation. The sedimentary formations, the deposits of liquid fluids 

 from cold and hot springs, which we daily see producing the 

 travertine strata near Rome, and near Hobart Town in Van 

 Diemen's Land, afibrd but a faint idea of the flotz formation. 

 In our seas, small banks of limestone, almost equal in hardness 

 at some parts to Carrara marble,* are in the course of forma- 

 tion, by gradual precipitation, accumulation, and cementation 

 — processes whose mode of action has not been sufficiently 

 well hivestigated. The Sicilian coast, the island of Ascension, 

 and King George's Sound in Australia, are instances of this 

 mode of formation. On the coasts of the Antilles, these 

 formations of the present ocean contain articles of pottery, 

 and other objects of human industry, and in Guadaloupe even 

 human skeletons of the Carib tribes. t The negroes of the 

 French colonies designate these formations by the name of 

 Maconne-bo?i-Dieu.t A small oolitic bed, formed in Lan- 

 cerote, one of the Canary Islands, and which, notwithstand- 



* Darwin, Volcanic Islands, 1844, p. 49 and 154. 



t [In most instances the bones are dispersed ; but a large.slab of rock, 

 ui which a considerable portion of the skeleton of a female is imbedded, 

 is preserved in the British Museum. The presence of these bones has 

 been explained by the circumstance of a battle, and the massacre of a 

 tribe of Gallibis by the Caribs, v/hich took place near the spot in which 

 they are found, about 120 years ago ; for, as the bodies of the slain 

 were i|^terred on the sea-shore, their skeletons may have been subse- 

 quently covered by sand-drift, which has since consolidated into lime- 

 stone. Dr. Moultrie, of the Medical College, Charleston, South Caro- 

 liua, U. S., is, however, of opinion that these bones did not belong to 

 individuals of the Carib tribe, but of the Peruvian race, or of a tribe 

 possessing a similar craniological development.] — Tr. 



t Moreau de Jonnes, Hisf. Phys. des Antilles, t. i., p. 136, 138, and 

 543; Humboldt, Relation Historique, X. iii., (>. 367. 



