AGASSIZ: BAHAMAS. 125 



beaches were thrown up some of the largest specimens of Madrepora 

 palmata I have seen. The branches were from twenty to twenty-eight 

 inches wide, fully eighteen inches thick, and some of the pieces were as 

 long as eight feet, and many were over six. 1 



Cay Confites is just on the edge of the bank (Plate XIV. Fig. 2). The 

 northern end of its slope off the cay is steep, leaving no space for an 

 extended reef. The cay is situated at the narrowest part of the Old 

 Bahama Channel, where the trade wind drives into a deep funnel all 

 that comes floating along the equatorial drift from the northern shores 

 of the larger West India Islands and from the Virgin and Windward 

 Islands, so that, besides the blocks of recent corals thrown up by heavy 

 surf on the surface of the cay, there are found logs and twigs of all sizes 

 and of many species of wood, beans, calabashes, sugar-cane, bamboo, and 

 cocoanuts. With a fertile soil many of the waifs thus thrown upon this 

 island would soon get a foothold, and it would be interesting to make a 

 list of the species of plants which are thus carried by the trades and the 

 currents far from their origin. On the poor soil so characteristic of all 

 reef rock land we found growing mainly such plants as are character- 

 istic of the immediate shore line in the Bahamas and other West India 

 Islands. The Pupa so common on the Bahamas was also found on Cay 

 Confites. 



Cay Lobos. 



Plate I. 



Cay Lobos, on the opposite side of the old Bahama Channel, is a recent 

 coral island, at least the exposed surface was entirely made up of frag- 

 ments of recent corals which conceal the foundation Eeolian rock upon 

 which the lighthouse has been built. 



Paredon Grande to Cay Frances. 



Plate I. ; Plate XIII. Fig. 2. 



The island of Paredon Grande is composed of low, rocky bluffs, re- 

 maining from the disintegration of the second terrace, the sea front of 



1 On Enderbury's Island similar large Madrepores with the mode of growth of 

 M. palmata extend over areas of twelve to fifteen feet in diameter. These vie in 

 size with the huue masses of Porites one meets with on the reef flat near Honolulu. 

 They are nearly as large as those found in the rock of the inner reef of Tongatabu, 

 stated by Dana (Corals and Coral Islands, p. 186) to measure twenty-five feet in 

 diameter, or as the Astraans and Ma?andrina2 both there and at the Feejees meas- 

 uring from twelve to fifteen feet (Ibid., p. 146). 



