108 GEOLOGICAL RESEARCHES IN 



South of Yokohama the ridge of the peninsula of Sagami also furnishes frag- 

 ments of serpentine. The western side of the peninsula, as well as the island of 

 Enosima, are of a firm, fine-grained gray sandstone and conglomerate, in apparently 

 horizontal strata. 



Previous to the elevation of the recent beds, the peninsula of Sagami, and probably 

 also the highland east of the Bay of Yedo, were islands. 



The existence of these recent marine terraces along the Japanese coast, from 

 Yesso to Kiusiu, and of similar deposits on the China coast, as at Chifu and along the 

 western edge of the great delta plain, point to widely extended changes, in recent 

 times, in the relative position of land and water. A careful study of their charac- 

 ters, as regards the organisms they contain — a study that should include the recent 

 deposits of the Amur system,^ and perhaps also those of the Manchurian rivers — 

 would probably throw much light on the age of the Gobi desert deposits, and 

 through this on some of the most important questions of quaternary and younger 

 tertiary geology. 



' M. Schmidt observed, almost everywhere on the Amur, between Strelka and Blahowestschensk, 

 terraces of fresh-water tertiary rising nearly 200 feet above the river. — Peterman's Mittheilungen, 

 1861, p. 315. 



