62 BULLETIN : MUSEUM OF COMPARATIVE ZOOLOGY. 



other rocky banks, ending with the Gingerbread Ground in the east. 

 There we strike the extensive bight between it and Little Stirrup Cay, 

 where the bank slopes most gradually from the 3 fathom line to the 

 12 or 15 fathom line, and then drops suddenly to the 100 fathom line, 

 the ledges named above forming the northwestern edge of the bank. 



The Berry Islands. 



Plate XII. Fig. 4. 



We passed the islands to the westward of Great Stirrup Cay in the 

 dark, but that island and those of the Berry Islands which we saw dur- 

 ing the day were all of reolian rock. Great Stirrup Cay is full of pot- 

 holes and sinks ; it is comparatively well wooded, as well as many of the 

 Berry Islands and of the islands to the northwest visible from our an- 

 chorage in Great Harbor. 



All the way from Great Harbor south we found irregular patches and 

 bars of corals on the shelf to the eastward of the Berry Islands, extend- 

 ing from three to four fathoms or less to fifteen or sixteen near the 

 eastern edge of the bank. Coming from the west, I am informed that 

 from Gingerbread Ground similar coral reefs extend as far as Greal 

 Harbor Cay, on the shelf of the banks, outside of the cays. 



The islands, islets, and rocks known as the Berry Islands, extending 

 along the Providence Channel and forming the northeastern edge of that 

 part of the bank of which Andros is the principal land, are both as 

 to number and size in marked contrast with the small and insignificant 

 islets and rocks which occupy the edge of the bank flanked by the Gulf 

 Stream. The principal cays of the Berry Islands, such as Haines Cay, 

 Little Harbor Cay, Alder Cay, Bond's Cay, as far as Whale Cay, present 

 no features of special interest. Their surface appears well pitted and 

 honeycombed, as their eastern face gets the full force of the northeast 

 trades. Near their highest point they are covered by a very scanty 

 vegetation. The outer line of cays protect a beautiful sheet of water of 

 a brilliant light green. 



They show the usual variation in height of from twenty-five to thirty 

 feet, occasionally rising, as at Haines Bluff and Devil's Bluff, to fifty or 

 sixty feet, their eastern faces presenting the ordinary variation of low 

 vertical cliffs where the headlands have been cut off by the action of 

 the sea, or the more or less extended coral sand beaches stretching 

 between those promontories, with here and there extensive walls of 

 seolian blocks thrown up above high-water mark, as on the Market Fish 



