276 BULLETIN CF THE 
These elevations may be only the remnants of an aboriginal uneven 
surface, but collectively they generally represent a higher land than 
existed before the Cuchilla plains were developed. Whether the high 
summits of the Sierra Maestra adjacent to the Santiago coast contain or 
preserve traces of still older levels is an interesting problem for the future. 
These phonomena may now be grouped into three distinct age cate- 
gories, one of which is still further divisible into many stibdivisions. 
These are (1) the modern or well preserved tripartite group of lower 
lying levels, cliffs, or terraces, including the modern soboruco, the highest 
level of which approximates three hundred feet ; (2) the dissected and 
greatly denuded remuants of the old Cuchilla level, five hundred to seven 
bundred feet above the sea, the remnant of an old general height whose 
integrity is almost destroyed, and which is less easily traceable than the 
first ; (3) remnants of the almost destroyed more ancient upland, as 
preserved in the isolated buttes of the Yunque and Pan de Matanzas 
type and the higher limestones of Santiago and Cienfuegos, which 
demonstrate that there was once an old surface at least two thousand 
feet above the modern sea level. 
The obvious history of these levels is as follows : — 
(1) In a period near the close of the Tertiary, to be ascertained, long 
previous to the emergence of the present elevated reef and cantera and 
the erosion of the Cuchilla plain, there was a great upward movement 
of the island to the height of at least two thonsand feet, which as yet 
has revealed no history of its details further than that, from the absence 
of later deposits and from the character of its ancient and much sculp-’ 
tured topography, we may fairly infer that it has not since subsided 
beneath the sea, but has remained mostly dry land, and that its area 
and outline were very nearly as great as those of the island of to-day. 
This includes those portions of the island above the dissected Cuchilla 
plain. 
(2) The Cuchillas at five-hundred-foot level constitute a plain or 
plains produced by base levelling in the epoch immediately following 
this oldest period of elevation, and represent the time interval between 
it and the later movement recorded in the first or lower group. The 
country was planed down by erosion to near sea level. The Cuchillas 
summits indicate a long pausation period between the old Yunque and the 
renewed modern elevation recorded in the Yumuri cliffs cut around them. 
(3) The tripartite group of modern cliffs and base levels below and 
against the Cuchilla escarpment are the product of a renewed and mod- 
ern upward movement, which elevated the old Cuchilla coastal plain to 
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