32 bulletin: museum of compakative zoology. 



The condition of the western face of Eleuthera shows admirably the 

 method of erosion, disintegration, and denudation which has taken place 

 on the inner face of an island facing the great bank of which the part now 

 worn away must once have been the summit surface. • 



Going south from the Glass Window, we keep sufficiently within sight 

 of the land to read, as we pass along, its former history. About two 

 miles south from the " Cove," where we anchored, begin a series of ver- 

 tical cliffs, which continue almost uninterruptedly as far as Hatchet 

 Point. They are full of holes and of small caverns, ribbed with stalac- 

 tites, giving the face of the cliffs, not only here but everywhere nearly 

 in the Bahamas, the appearance of basaltic rocks, more or less eaten 

 away at the base. The cliffs are the remnants of the headlands, which 

 have been worn away first, leaving only here and there a slope reaching 

 from the inner hills to the shore. All along the west coast there is excel- 

 lent sponging and fishing for large conchs. We found conch-shells and 

 fragments of corals thrown up fully twenty-five feet above high-water 

 mark, and lighter fragments of shells and dried stems of Gorgonians blown 

 by the winds to the highest points of the hills on each side of the Glass 

 Window. 



Dana describes the surface of Metia, an elevated coral island which 

 presents, I should say, much the same honeycombed appearance so char- 

 acteristic of the more exposed and weathered islands and islets of the 

 Bahamas, especially as seen at the Glass Window (see Plate XXX.). Its 

 shore cliffs and rounded summits present a striking resemblance to some 

 of the Bahamas. Compare the figure given by Dana (Corals and Coral 

 Islands, page 193) with the figures I have given of the Bahama seolian 

 hills and cliffs. 



All the way from Hatchet Point to Governor Harbor (Plate X. Fig. 2) 

 the same succession of vertical cliffs continues, with the same undulat- 

 ing, rolling seolian hills, perhaps a little lower behind the shore cliffs than 

 farther north. To the south of Governor Harbor the ground falls off a 

 good deal to Savanna Sound, and there are fewer vertical cliffs along the 

 rest of the shore of Eleuthera extending to Powell Point. While coast- 

 ing along Eleuthera we were taken at a good rate by a fresh northwester, 

 which stirred up the bottom very extensively, and the whole sea was one 

 mass of milky water carrying a very perceptible amount of particles of 

 lime in suspension, derived both from the bottom and from the shores. 

 There is to the westward of the island extending from the Cove to a few 

 miles north of Tarpon Point a marked depression in the general level of 

 the bank, varying from four to six fathoms in depth, with an average 



