seres ge emersit A 
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BRANNER: THE STONE REEFS OF BRAZIL. 129 
The accompanying plate (5), made from the beautiful topographic sheet 
just issued by the Commissão Geographica e Geologica de São Paulo under 
Prof. О. A. Derby, shows the general features of that interesting region. 
The Serra do Mar, from an elevation of over one thousand metres, 
here slopes abruptly beneath the flat mangrove swamps that lie along 
its base in the neighborhood of Santos. These swamps, cut here and 
there by winding tide streams, extend up and down the coast, but are 
interrupted now and then by headlands — like that at Guárujá — that 
are really mountain spurs extending down to the sea. 
The hills over the plains about Santos are mostly mountain-tops pro- 
truding from the mud and sands that have accumulated in the original 
bay since the depression took place. Morro do Taipú, Ponta de Itaipú, 
Morro do Xixova, and Morro Itararé were all originally the crest of a 
ridge that continued past Barnabé Island in the direction of Pico Jacoa- 
reguáva, while Ponta Mandúba was the crest of another ridge passing 
Guárujá in the same direction. The hills south of the Praia de Per- 
nambuco were the crest of another of these parallel ridges. 
A striking thing about the ports of Brazil is that the small ones have 
all been choked up by coast débris, and only the two big ones, Bahia 
and Rio de Janeiro, have been able, on account of the depths of their 
mouths and the consequent scour of the tides, to keep their basins open. 
But even these large ones are filling in from their upper ends, a process 
greatly hastened on the coast of Brazil by the growth and encroachment 
of mangrove plants. 
Coast lakes. — Lakes may be formed along a coast by an elevation 
bringing up closed basins — accidental forms of the sea floor," or they 
may be caused by a depression of troughs, valleys, or shallow-mouthed 
estuaries whose ends become closed in time by shore accretions, however 
made, but generally the result of the destructive and constructive work 
of the sea. The strong winds and currents that set against the Brazilian 
coast the whole year round make the contest between land forces and 
sea forces an unequal one; tho sea is aggressive and always gaining. 
The headlands are cut away and their remains thrown into every in- 
dentation of the coast, damming in rivers and obliging them sometimes to 
wander for kilometres behind huge spits before they can escape to the sea. 
If, with these two methods of lake-forming in mind, we attempt to 
get at the history of the Brazilian coast lakes, we find that information 
regarding their surroundings is too meagre in most cases to enable us to 
1 Such as are apparently meant by Capanema. Petermann’s Mittheilungen, 1874, 
р. 280. 
VOL, XLIV. 9 
