THEORY OF THE EARTH. 117 



pregnated with calcareous matter. * The human 

 bones found near Koestriz, and pointed out by 

 M. de Schlotheim, had been announced as taken 



* These skeletons, more or less mutilated, are found near 

 Port de Moule, on the north-west coast of the mainland of 

 Guadaloupe, in a kind of slope resting against the steep 

 edges of the island. This slope is, in a great measure, covered 

 by the sea at high- water, and is nothing else than a tufa, 

 formed, and daily augmented, by the very small debris of 

 shells and corals, which the waves detach from the rocks, 

 and the accumulated mass of which assumes a great degree 

 of cohesion in the places that are most frequently left dry. 

 We find, on examining them with a lens, that several of 

 these fragments have the same red tint as a part of the 

 corals contained in the reefs of the island. Formations of 

 this kind are common in the whole archipelago of the An- 

 tilles, where they are known to the Negroes under the name 

 of Ma?onne-bon-dieu. Their augmentation is proportioned 

 to the violence of the surge. They have extended the plain 

 of the Cayes to St Domingo, the situation of which has 

 some resemblance to the Plage du Moule, and there are 

 sometimes found in it fragments of earthen vessels, and of 

 other articles of human fabrication, at a depth of twenty 

 feet. A thousand conjectures have been made, and even 

 events imagined, to account for these skeletons of Guada- 

 loupe. But, from all the circumstances of the case, M. Mo- 

 reau de Jonnes, correspondent of the Academy of Sciences, 

 who has been upon the spot, and to whom I am indebted for 

 the above details, thinks that they are merely bodies of per- 

 sons that have perished by shipwreck. They were discovered 

 in 1805 by M. Manuel Cortes y Campomanes, at that time 

 a general officer in the service of the colonv- General Er- 



