AGASSIZ: BAHAMAS. 75 



place is taken by scrub vegetation. The island becomes quite flat ; 

 there are but few rock exposures, and longer reaches of sand beaches. 

 We still find flourishing patches of coral heads all along the coast, but 

 they are disconnected, and the patches are often far apart. When off 

 the northern extremity of Bahama Island we could see from the rig- 

 ging the east shore of the island cut up into numerous small islands, 

 many of which are still well covered with pines, far better than is the 

 western part of the northern extremity of the island. These numerous 

 cays and estuaries are not marked on the charts; in fact, the eastern 

 and northern coasts of Bahama Island have not as yet been thoroughly 

 examined and mapped out. Here and there on the west coast, close to 

 the shore, are left a few pine trees, and the mangroves are in many 

 places large and most flourishing. 



All along Bahama Island, as well as along Andros, where the bar- 

 rier reefs are perhaps better developed than elsewhere along the sea 

 face of the bank, wherever there are breaks in the barrier reef so that 

 the shore line is not pi'otected by it from the action of the sea, we find 

 stretches of sand beaches corresponding to the openings left in the bar- 

 rier reef ; while opposite the unbroken reaches of the barrier reef the 

 shores are i - ocky, exposing in full view the underlying seolian rocks, which 

 are not covered up in part by the reef sand, as in the shore opposite the 

 breaks. 



After leaving Settlement Point we came upon Indian and Wood Cays, 

 the rocky remnants of the western side of Bahama Island. Sandy Cay 

 is low, not more than fourteen feet in height, with no exposed trace of 

 the underlying seolian rock of the bank. 



Memory Bock (Plate XXXIX.), close to which we passed as we turned 

 eastward to cross the bank, is perhaps one of the most characteristic of 

 the outlying sentinels of what once formed a part of the greater Little 

 Bahama Land. The gradual disappearance of this land as we pass north 

 is most characteristic. We can as it were follow the disintegration 

 which has taken place about the northern part of Bahama Island, 

 the character of which changes radically as we leave the pine barren 

 flats and pass to the bare rounded rocky hills, pitted, honeycombed, and 

 worn, which form its western end, and to the numerous cays extending 

 eastward, thickly wooded, covered with pines, which are the continua- 

 tion northward of the pine barrens of the main island. 



Nearer the western edge of the bank, Indian and Wood Cays are 

 more or less exposed to the same agencies which have acted upon the 

 Bahama Islands in so uniform a manner. On Wood Cay we find large 



