BRANNER: THE STONE REEFS OF BRAZIL. TIT 
the Rio Formoso reef, where it is popularly known as the “Pedra de 
Nossa Senhora.” At ordinary high tide the reefs all along the coast 
appear for the most part as a line of breakers with black points of 
rock now exposed and now covered by the surf. Whether the waves 
break over the reef during neap tides depends much on the winds 
blowing on shore. At low tide these reefs almost invariably stand out 
like black walls surf-beaten on the seaward side, 
Tf any one acquainted with the reefs should say that they were entirely 
covered at high tide, there would be some one else equally well ac- 
quainted with them to contend and to prove that they were never 
entirely covered. 
But as long as the unbroken reef rocks do not rise beyond the reach 
of the highest storm tides we are not justified in assuming that they 
have been elevated. 
There has been a certain apparent recession of the sea, due, however, 
not to the elevation of the land, but to the silting up of the marshes, 
estuaries, lakes, and mangrove swamps behind the reefs. 
In 1881 MM. Victor Fournié, sometime city engineer of Pernambuco, 
and Emile Beringer, his assistant, published a * mémoire sur le port du 
Recife” 1 accompanied by a carefully made (in 1876) map of Pernam- 
buco and its environs. On this same map is an overprint of the best 
map it was possible to compile from those made by the Dutch, of the 
Same region, during the first half of the seventeenth century. This map 
is the most important document we have of the kind bearing upon coast 
changes within historic times. It shows that since these early maps were 
made, channels then open have filled up, others have been much nar- 
towed, and large areas, then either swamps or quite under water, have 
become dry lands and have been built up with houses. M. Beringer 
remarks (р. 20), “The São José quarter was a great marsh covered at 
high tide,” while the width of the channel at the Recife bridge was 
nearly half as great again as it was in 1876. 
Conclusions. —The statements here cited and the facts given, some of 
them dating back to the first half of the sixteenth century, — more than 
three hundred years ago, — suggest, if they do not show conclusively, 
that there has been no striking, or even, to the ordinary intelligent 
observer, perceptible change in the reefs from that time to this, while 
the channels then open behind them have been gradually filled up. I, 
then, there has been an elevation or depression of this coast within the 
1 Bijbladen van het Tijdschrift van het Aardrijkskundig Genootschep. Am- 
Sterdam, 1881. 
