THE BAHAMAS AND BERMUDAS 307 



We have landed on the way up at all the interesting 

 points on the Keys — and on the way down I am taking 

 the outer reef and the reefs in the intervening channel. 

 When up at Key Biscay ne it suddenly came across 

 me that I had not been there since I was quite a small 

 boy in the winter of 1850-51, when I distinguished my- 

 self by falling down the hatch of a Coast Survey vessel 

 and being picked up' for dead and laid out on the sofa 

 of the cabin, where, however, I soon came to and have 

 been pretty lively ever since. We then examined pretty 

 nearly the same rock exposures I examined then in 

 Father's company, only what he saw, and which I sup- 

 posed he had seen, does not exist — but no one who has 

 not seen Bahamas and Bermudas would have written 

 differently. I have found the old reef which runs all the 

 way from Key West to Key Biscayne, which has been 

 elevated just like the Cuban reef, but only not more 

 than six to twenty feet at the outside. Everybody has 

 looked upon this inner reef as similar to the outer sea- 

 faced [reef] formed in the same way. What I said about 

 the Tortugas is, I think, all right, for I was not then look- 

 ing at the Keys in the eyes of what had been dinned 

 into me by Father." 



On this expedition Agassiz was surprised to find that 

 Lower Matecumbe Key was edged by a slightly elevated 

 coral reef, which he was able to trace as far as the keys 

 off the central part of Key Biscayne Bay. From his 

 present investigations, combined with the results of the 

 borings at Key West, he reached the conclusion that in 

 Pliocene times the landward extension of what is known 

 as the Pourtales plateau stretched in a series of bars and 

 flats from the outer reef of to-day many miles inland of 



