CORMORANT ROCK. 
Cormorant Rock is situated one mile south from the most 
southeasterly point of the Island of Rhode Island. This jagged 
mass of weathered granite is about an acre in extent and rises 
some twenty-five feet above the level of the ocean. The 
highest point is nearest the northerly side, and the southerly 
exposure is broader and somewhat flattened. Separated from 
the larger rock by a deep, narrow channel, is another rock about 
one fifteenth as large, but nearly as high. Opening to the north- 
west, on the northerly side of the greater rock, is a small cove, 
filled with boulders, which is partly encircled by an arm of the 
rock that makes out to the north and west. It is only in this 
cove that a landing can be made with safety in smooth weather, 
for the ocean swell is constantly surging around the other sides 
in a foreboding manner. No land vegetation ever grows on this 
lonely rock, for whatever soil collects on the higher portions, 
through the disintegration of the rock or the deposits made upon 
it by birds, is swept away during heavy storms when the waves 
make a clean sweep of the rocks. The average rise and fall of 
the tide at this point is four feet, and the land around the rock, 
below the high tide line, is covered with a luxuriant growth 
of slimy ooze, rockweed (/ucus) muscles, and barnacles. 
Looking at the rock from a geologist’s point of view, it is of 
igneous origin, being composed throughout of gray granite of a 
coarse crystalline structure and well seamed with cleavage planes 
that divide it up in more or less regular parallelopipeds of varying 
size, from a few cubic inches to as many cubic yards. The 
rock rises abruptly in ten fathoms of water from a hard bottom, 
and ‘forms a line with outcroppings of similar rocks that occur on 
Sakonnet Point and the southwesterly part of the Island of 
Rhode Island. The mesa top of the rock always presents a whit- 
ish appearance, which is owing to the lime deposited there by 
the birds that roost on its summit. This lime has penetrated 
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